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Tag: Australia

  • The Realities of Changing Power in Asia Require a Fundamental Rethink in Australian Policies

    And important article has been written by Hugh White the emeritus professor of strategic studies at the Australian National University and a former deputy secretary of the Department of Defence. It deserves to be widely read and the points he makes absorbed by all who are concerned about the current direction of Australia’s defence strategy.

    White commences his article by pointing out the alarming drop in Australian exports to China, a country that is by far its major trading market, taking 40% of Australia’s exports.  That is a figure twice the proportion of Australia’s next largest market, Japan.

    Australia is responding to the difficulties with China by going out of its way to seek new ways of offending the country. It has deteriorated to the point where senior government ministers are talking with what he calls disconcerting nonchalance to the growing risk of war. He points out that the government shows no signs of appreciating how serious and dangerous the current situation is. Equally disturbing is that the government seems to have no plan to fix the problem. This must count, he says, as one of the biggest failures in Australian history.

    On a more contentious level, White points out that Australia’s interests have been well served by the United States led order. He argues that this order has kept our region stable and peaceful for so long. That is dubious to say the least. In the post-World War II era the United States promoted the Korean war, invading the North of Korea and continuing right to the Chinese border. We now know that the Americans sought the approval of President Truman to use nuclear weapons as part of the invasion of China, then under a newly installed Communist government.

    The American belligerence brought China into that war, with the Americans and their allies, including Australia, being rapidly driven back south of the North-South Korean border. Millions of North Koreans died in the aerial assault by the Americans on their country over the next two years.

    It would also be difficult to argue that the United States war on Vietnam, again with the willing assistance of Australia, that raged from 1954 with the defeat of the French at Dien Bien Phu to their final humiliating retreat in 1975.

    White says that the Australian government has a plan, it wants to make the Chinese problem go away by forcing the Chinese to go away and abandon its own ambitions in favour of United States concept of the rules-based order, a peculiarly framed concept that the Americans have long promoted. This writer argues that it is an attempt to replace the more widely accepted concept of the rule of international law which has served the international community well in the post-World War II era.

    Australia has been quick to join the Americans, and more recently the British, in placing China at the top of its opponents list. White points out how easily this plan to contain China could go awry.

    Australian policy is based in large part on a belief that its concerns are shared by other nations in the region. That seriously underestimates the extent to which other countries in the region value their economic ties to China. China is by objective measurement the world’s largest economy and by the estimate of Australia’s own 2017 foreign policy White Paper will be close to double the size of the United States economy by 2030.

    This simple stark brutal fact overshadows everything else, White says, because wealth is power in the international system. One of the simple effects of China’s great power is that it could easily impose great costs on those who oppose it. That is the fundamental principle that the Australian government fails to acknowledge.

    It is the brutal reality that Australia’s other friends in the region, including Singapore, South Korea and even Japan, recognise. He quotes Singapore prime minister Lee who in a recent major speech very plainly repudiated the idea of trying to control China. Instead, Lee argued, we should be accommodating China’s ambitions by creating a new regional order that reflects the new realities of regional power.

    Those realities mean that the Morrison government ambition to push China “back into the box” are doomed to fail. This is a reality that is even recognised by the Americans under President Biden. Biden will choose the option of rebuilding America to that of trying to contain China.

    It is a brutal reality that has not been recognised by the “lacklustre administration” in power in Australia. White argues that the current Australian leadership seems to have no idea of the risks to Australia that their current policy represents. The government is currently hiding behind the benefits of the high iron ore price. The future looks a lot grimmer for Australian exports, with other markets only partially replacing the lost Chinese market.

    As important as the economic losses are, however, they are trivial in comparison with the strategic risks and costs that Australia faces as a consequence of its incredible stupidity in advocating a policy of containment toward China.

    White points out that the current Australian policy toward China runs the very real risk of degenerating into a shooting war. This blunt effect was recently acknowledged, among others, by defence Minister Peter Dutton. The governing assumption appears to be that the United States will go to war with China, and that Australia will follow along, as it has done so in the past, Including in at least three current foreign wars of little or no real relevance to Australia.

    The consequences of Australia fighting a war with China would be devastating. Not the least of its consequences would be the loss of America’s position in Asia. Australia is blindly following the United States into the possibility of a war with China and no one in the government appears to have given a thought as to the consequences of what is almost certainly an American loss.

    Australia needs to spend some serious time thinking about a new approach to China, indeed to the implications of the inevitable rise of our great Asian neighbouring powers, including India and Indonesia. All of this has implications for Australia’s relationship to its traditional modes of thinking, none of which is of real relevance in the realities of the 21st century.

    White points out that such rethinking would require hard work, deep thought and subtle execution. It would mean, he says, a revolution in our foreign policy. The changes in our region require nothing less. The real question is whether our political leadership even begins to grasp the implications of these changes and do they have the wit to formulate and execute the policy changes that are so manifestly required. Thus far the signs are not encouraging.

    This article was posted on Monday, May 10th, 2021 at 3:57pm and is filed under Asia, Australia, China, Trade, United States.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Forgetting Citizenship: Australia Suspends Flights from India

    As India is being devastated by COVID-19 cases that have now passed a daily rate of 400,000, affluent and callous Australia has taken the decision to suspend all flights coming into the country till mid-month.  The decision was reached by the Morrison government with the blessing of the State Premiers and the Labor opposition.

    Not happy with banning flights from India, the Morrison government promises to be savage in punishing returnees who find ways to circumvent the ban (for instance, by travelling via a third country).  Citizens who breach the travel ban can face up to five years’ imprisonment and fines up to AU$66,000.  “We have taken drastic action to keep Australians safe,” explained the Treasurer Josh Frydenberg.  The situation in India was “serious”; the decision had only been reached after considering the medical advice.

    According to a statement from Health Minister Greg Hunt, it was “critical the integrity of the Australian public health and quarantine systems is protected and the number of COVID-19 cases in quarantine is reduced to a manageable level.”

    The decision fails to carry any weight.  It did not take long for more alert medical practitioners to wonder why the approach to India was being so selectively severe.  Health commentator and GP Vyom Sharma thought the decision “incredibly disproportionate to the threat that it posed”.  Sharma is certainly correct on this score in terms of international law, which requires the least restrictive or least intrusive way of protecting citizens.

    Then there was the issue about the previous policies Canberra had adopted to countries suffering from galloping COVID-19 figures.  A baffled Sharma wondered, “Why is it that India has copped this ban and no people who have come from America?” Former race discrimination commissioner Tim Soutphommasane seconds the suspicions.  “We didn’t see differential treatment being extended to countries such as the United States, the UK, and any other European country even though the rates of infection were very high and the danger of its arrivals from those countries was very high.”

    The Australian Human Rights Commission has also asked the federal government to justify its actions. “The government must show that these measures are not discriminatory and the only suitable way of dealing with the threat to public health.”

    In the face of such behaviour, aggrieved citizens are left with few legal measures.  Australia, among liberal democratic states, is idiosyncratic in refusing to adopt a charter of rights. Down Under, parliamentarians are supposedly wise and keen to uphold human rights till they think otherwise.  (Human rights, the argument goes, would become the fodder of lawyers and judges, interfering with the absolute will of Parliament and the electors.)  The Australian Constitution is hopelessly silent on the issue of citizenship.  Left at the mercy of legislative regulation, Parliament and the executive can be disdainful towards their citizens without consequences.

    One avenue remains the Geneva-based UN Human Rights Committee.  On April 15, the UNHRC ruled on the case of two petitioners of FreeAndOpenAustralia.org (formerly StrandedAussies.org) that the Morrison government had to “facilitate and ensure their prompt return to Australia.”

    Represented by the notable sage of international law Geoffrey Robertson QC, the petitioners argued that Australia was in breach of Articles 12(4) and 2(3) of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights.  The first article provides that no one shall be arbitrarily deprived of the right to enter his own country; the second provides for “effective” remedies to be granted to those whose rights and freedoms have been breached under the ICCPR.  The petitioners also freely admitted that they had no issue with quarantining for 14 days on returning to Australia.

    In the words of Free and Open Australia spokesperson Deb Tellis, the Commonwealth should “use its power to expand quarantine facilities, and end travel caps that are being dictated by the states.  There are thousands of our fellow citizens suffering loss of their relatives and loss of their jobs.”

    The government has preferred a meaner, penny pinching approach in coping with quarantine, reducing flights when needed rather than expanding facilities to accommodate a greater number of infected arrivals.  The hotel quarantine system continues to receive effusive praise from the Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison as being 99.99 percent effective.  But it is impossible for him, and his ministers, to conceal the fact that they do not trust, and are unwilling, to use other facilities and expand existing ones.

    Since last November, there have been 16 COVID-19 leaks across the cities of Melbourne, Sydney, Brisbane, Adelaide and Perth from quarantine hotels.  At this writing, another quarantine leak is being reported in Western Australia, involving the now customarily infected hotel security guard and the inevitable seepage into the community.  The problem of airborne transmission continues to plague, as does the uneven provision of Personal Protective Equipment.  No national standard of quarantine has been formulated through the country, with each state adopting its own approach.  Audits of the ventilation systems in many such hotels remain sketchy.

    Western Australian Premier Mark McGowan, who recently imposed a lockdown of the Perth and Peel areas and may well do the same thing over the next few days, suggested that the Commonwealth be generous with some of its facilities.  Why not use the RAAF Curtin Air Base, or the immigration detention centres of Yongah Hill and Christmas Island?  “It’s kind of staring us in the face and there are things that could assist, it’s just that the Commonwealth doesn’t want to do it.”

    The evidence so far is that facilities such as Howard Springs in the Northern Territory tend to work.  It features single-storey cabins, segregated air conditioning systems, outdoor veranda space and, in the vicinity, a fully functioning hospital.  No leaks have been recorded.  And location is everything: distant from densely populated areas.  This government, however, is miserly on the issue of quarantine, an obligation it has transferred without constitutional justification to State premiers who fear both the virus and its electoral consequences.

    This article was posted on Saturday, May 1st, 2021 at 7:31pm and is filed under Air Travel, Australia, Citizenship, COVID-19, Human Rights, India.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Mike Pezzullo and Giving War a Chance

    Those madly titillated by conflict have become bolder of late in the corridors of the isolated Australian capital.  In such spaces, insanity can be nurtured with a sickening attention to detail, much of it fictitious.  One of the most powerful bureaucrats of the Australian Public Service has made a contribution to a war dance he regards as virtually unavoidable.  Mike Pezzullo, Home Affairs Secretary, is keen to shed some blood in combating the China Menace if needed.

    The outcome of this wish is always vicarious: others die so that bureaucrats may shuffle papers, consult minutes and scoff the scotch.  This is then justified on the basis that sacrifices are necessary to defend that indefinable property called freedom.

    The Secretary’s ANZAC Day message to his staff was stocked with the usual rhetorical trinkets of the barely closeted warmonger.  “Today, as free nations again hear the beating drums and watch worryingly the militarisation of issues that we had, until recent years, thought unlikely to be catalysts for war, let us continue to search unceasingly for the chance for peace while bracing again, yet again, for the curse of war”.

    War is never caused by these “free nations”; it is provoked by those nasty unfree ones who go around stirring trouble.  Resorting to war “might well be folly, but the greater folly is to wish away the curse by refusing to give it thought and attention, as if in so doing, war might leave us be, forgetting us perhaps.”

    In wishing to summon the dogs of war, Pezzullo drew upon a person who was, for all his faults, a formidable general who knew a thing or two about combat.  US Army General Douglas MacArthur, in his address to the West Point Military academy in 1962, explained to cadets that “their mission was to train to fight and, when called upon, to win their nation’s wars – all is entrusted to others”.  One imagines Pezzullo, flushed with pride in using lines best reserved for a military veteran rather than a fantasising civilian.

    The bureaucrat’s poor use of history was much in evidence.  Having pinched from MacArthur, he duly did the same to US President Dwight D. Eisenhower who, in 1953, “rallied his fellow Americans to the danger posed by the amassing of Soviet military power, and the new risks of military aggression”.  (He forgets that the same president also warned of the paranoia and dangers associated with the Military-Industrial complex.)  Eisenhower was a good egg, having taken to instilling in “free nations the conviction that as long as there persists tyranny’s threat to freedom they must remain armed, strong and ready for war, even as they lament the course of war.”  The blood-readied formula for Pezzullo: “In a world of perpetual tension and dread, the drums of war beat – sometimes faintly and distantly, and at other times more loudly and ever closer.”

    When MacArthur found himself relieved by US President Harry S. Truman, a statement of priorities was made.  The General had been keen to expand the Korean conflict with the use of atomic weaponry, there being no credible substitute for victory.  In fairness to him, Truman had also given him ideas, wishing to threaten the potential use of atomic-capable B-29s should the need arise.  MacArthur saw that need, claiming that 30 to 50 tactical atomic bombs would have done the trick; Truman did not, preferring the bluff.  Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison might do well to consider a similar option regarding Pezzullo, who is making his far from negligible contribution to incitement.

    In the context of Australian history, few military engagements have been necessary for existentially sound reasons.  There have been no marauding armies of Huns, Mongols or Tartars to threaten the country, laying waste to villages and towns, and initiating hearty pogroms.  (The same cannot be said for the Indigenous populace, doomed the moment European settlement became a sanguinary reality of massacre, disease and dispossession.)

    A pity it is that a more mature constellation of thinkers have not impressed themselves in the field of Australian strategic thinking.  Instead, Australian soldiers have been fighting and dying in a range of operations in profound ignorance of their geography and history.  These recruits supply the needless cannon fodder for empires not their own, placating the officialdom of foreign capitals.

    The Australia-China policy, and the insistence on placing Australia on the warpath, is a suicidal wish linked to Washington and based on an alliance that is dangerously unconditional and misplaced.  Unfortunately for Australia’s military and defence establishment, all such alliances, however friendly, remain putatively conditional.  Matters of strategy, resources, and realities, will intrude.

    The fall of Singapore to the forces of Imperial Japan in February 1942 was one such jarring reality.  The guarantees of security made by Britain to Australia, assumed since the late eighteenth century, were shredded by a stunningly bold campaign waged by soldiers who had been woefully underestimated.  British naval power was blunted as Japanese prowess grew.  The reassurances of the Empire were dashed by surrender.  “This was a quintessential failure of an alliance,” wrote academic strategist Hugh White in 2017, “and of a strategic policy based on alliances.”

    White, far more sensible than Pezzullo on this score, speaks of the Singapore disaster as a telling lesson for Australian strategists.  It was a failure that revealed “an inability to recognise and accept fundamental shifts in the distribution of wealth and power which were transforming both the globe and the regional strategic orders, and undercutting Britain’s place in them.”

    The parallels with the US are all too clear.  From 1996 to the mid-2000s, bipartisan politics seemed to accept that Australian security could well be left in the broad, clasping hands of Washington.  But be wary of the shifting patterns of power, warns White, for “America is weaker economically, diplomatically and military than it has been since World War Two, and yet we rely on it more.”

    Another factor also lubricates such slavish refusals to accept the changed order of things.  Ignorance is the less than golden raw material that precedes misconceptions.  In time, these misconceptions become policy platforms.  The Australian Public Service (APS) is sorely lacking in much expertise that might sharpen a coherent focus towards the Indo-Pacific.  In 2019, an “independent review” of the APS characteristically tooted that, “The ongoing shift in global economic weight to Asia presents tremendous opportunities for Australia, along with risks and significant challenges.”

    Tritely, the review, titled Public Service Our Future, notes that the APS needed to “deepen its experience in, and knowledge of, Asia.”  Those behind making policy required “a more sophisticated understanding of the region, as well as Asian language proficiency.”

    For almost a decade now, there has been much chatter about needing to beef up the stock of knowledge of that most complex of continents.  The 2012 Asian Century White Paper was almost banal in stating that Australia was essentially flying blind in the region; there was a pressing need to “broaden and deepen our understanding of Asian cultures and language, to become more Asia literate.”  But the APS review found something quite different: “Coordinated and sustained action to deepen Asia-relevant capabilities was not taken then, and it remains a skills gap across the APS.”  Pezzullo’s barking remarks suggest that illiteracy regarding Asia has become intellectually fashionable and monumentally dangerous.

    This article was posted on Wednesday, April 28th, 2021 at 6:16am and is filed under Asia, Australia, China, Language, War.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Virtual Bunny Hugging: Boasting About Climate Change Goals

    He seemed frustrated.  While Scott Morrison’s international colleagues at the Leaders Summit on Climate were boastful in what their countries would do in decarbonising the global economy, Australia’s feeble contribution was put on offer.  Unable to meet his own vaccination targets, the Australian prime minister has decided to confine the word “target” in other areas of policy to oblivion.  Just as the term “climate change” has been avoided in the bowels of Canberra bureaucracy, meeting environmental objectives set in stone will be shunned.

    Ahead of the summit, Nobel Prize laureates had added their names to a letter intending to ruffle summit participants.  Comprising all fields, the 101 signatories urged countries “to act now to avoid a climate catastrophe by stopping the expansion of oil, gas and coal.”  Governments had “lagged, shockingly, behind what science demands and what a growing and powerful people-powered movement knows: urgent action is needed to end the expansion of fossil fuel production; phase out current production; and invest in renewable energy.”

    Deficiencies in the current climate change approach were noted: the Paris Agreement, for instance, makes no mention of oil, gas or coal; the fossil fuel industry was intending to expand, with 120% more coal, oil and gas slated for production by 2030. “The solution,” warn the Nobel Laureates, “is clear: fossil fuels must be kept in the ground.”

    To Morrison and his cabinet, these voices are mere wiseacres who sip coffee and down the chardonnay with relish, oblivious to dirty realities.  His address to the annual dinner of the Business Council of Australia took the view that Australia would “not achieve net zero in the cafes, dinner parties and wine bars of our inner cities.”  Having treated environmental activism as delusionary, he suggested that industries not be taxed, as they provided “livelihoods for millions of Australians off the planet, as our political opponents sought to do when they were given the chance.”

    US President Joe Biden had little appetite for such social distinctions in speaking to summit participants.  (Unfortunately for the President, the preceding introduction by Vice President Kamala Harris was echoed on the live stream, one of various glitches marking the meeting.)   After four years of a crockery breaking retreat from the subject of climate change, this new administration was hoping to steal back some ground and jump the queue in combating climate change.  The new target: cutting greenhouse gas emissions by half from 2005 levels by 2030.

    Biden wished to construct “a critical infrastructure to produce and deploy clean energy”.  He saw workers in their numbers capping abandoned oil and gas wells and reclaiming abandoned coal mines.  He dreamed of autoworkers in their efforts to build “the next generation of electric vehicles” assisted by electricians and the installing of 500,000 charging stations.

    US Secretary of State Antony Blinken laboured the theme of togetherness in his opening remarks: “We’re in this together. And what each of our nations does or does not do will not only impact people of our country, but people everywhere.”  But Blinken was also keen, at least in terms of language, to seize some ground for US leadership.  “We want every country here to know: We want to work with you to save our planet, and we’re all committed to finding every possible avenue of cooperation on climate change.”

    A central part of this policy will involve implementing the Climate Finance Plan, intended to provide and mobilise “financial resources to assist developing countries reduce and/or avoid greenhouse gas emissions and build resilience and adapt to the impacts of climate change.”

    While solidarity and collaboration were points the Biden administration wished to reiterate, ill-tempered political rivalries were hard to contain.  On April 19, Blinken conceded during his address to the Chesapeake Bay Foundation that China was “the largest producer and exporter of solar panels, wind turbines, batteries, electric vehicles.”  It held, he sulkily noted, almost “a third of the world’s renewable energy patents.”

    Environmental policy, in other words, had to become the next terrain of competition; in this, a good degree of naked self-interest would be required.  “If we don’t catch up, America will miss the chance to shape the world’s climate future in a way that reflects our interests and values, and we’ll lose out on countless jobs for the American people.”  Forget bleeding heart arguments about solidarity and collective worth: the US, if it was to win “the long-term strategic competition with China” needed to “lead the renewable energy revolution.”

    Others in attendance also had their share of chest-thumping ambition. The United Kingdom’s Boris Johnson was all self-praise about his country having the “biggest offshore wind capacity of any country in the word, the Saudi Arabia of wind as I never tire of saying.”  The country was half-way towards carbon neutrality.  He also offered a new target: cutting emissions by 78 percent under 1990 levels by 2035.  Wishing to emphasise his seriousness of it all, Johnson claimed that combating climate change was not “all about some expensive politically correct green act of ‘bunny hugging’.”

    Canada also promised a more ambitious emissions reduction target: the Nationally Determined Contribution (NDC) would be reduced by 40-45 percent below 2005 levels by 2030.  “Canada’s Strengthened Climate Plan,” stated Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, “puts us on track to not just meet but to exceed our 2030 emissions goal – but we were clearly aware that more must be done.”

    Brazil’s President and climate change sceptic Jair Bolsonaro chose to keep up appearances with his peers, aligning the posts to meet emissions neutrality by 2050.  This shaved off ten years from the previous objective.  He also promised a doubling of funding for environmental enforcement.  Fine undertakings from a political figure whose policies towards the Amazon rainforest have been vandalising in their destruction.

    Japan’s Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga also threw in his lot with a goal of securing a 46 percent reduction by 2030. (The previous target had been a more modest 26 percent reduction based on 2013 levels.)  This did little to delight Akio Toyoda, president of Toyota Motor.  “What Japan needs to do now,” he warned, “is to expand its options for technology.”  Any immediate bans on gasoline-powered or diesel cars, for instance, “would limit such options, and could also cause Japan to lose its strengths.”

    Toyoda’s sentiments, along with those of Japan’s business lobby Keidanren, would have made much sense to Morrison.  In a speech shorn of ambition, the Australian prime minister began to speak with his microphone muted.  Then came his own version of ambitiousness, certain that Australia’s record on climate change was replete with “setting, achieving and exceeding our commitments”.

    It was not long before he was speaking, not to the leaders of the world, but a domestic audience breast fed by the fossil fuel industries.  Australia was “on the pathway to net zero” and intent on getting “there as soon as we possibly can, through technology that enables and transforms our industries, not taxes that eliminate them and the jobs and livelihoods they support and create, especially in our regions.”  His own slew of promises: Australia would invest in clean hydrogen, green steel, energy storage and carbon capture.  The US might well have Silicon Valley, but Australia would, in time, create “Hydrogen Valleys”.

    With such unremarkable, even pitiable undertakings, critics could only marvel at a list of initiatives that risk disappearing in the frothy stew.  “Targets on their own, won’t lead to emission cuts,” reflected Greenpeace UK’s head of climate, Kate Blagojevic.  “That takes real policy and money.  And that’s where the whole world is still way off course.”  Ahead of COP26 at Glasgow, Morrison will be hoping that the world remains divided and very much off course.

    This article was posted on Friday, April 23rd, 2021 at 11:51pm and is filed under Australia, Boris Johnson, Brazil, Canada, Climate Change, Fossil Fuel Emissions (FFE), Global Warming, Jair Bolsonaro, Japan, Joe Biden, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, Prime Minister Scott Morrison, Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga, United Kingdom.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Coronavirus Strikes Papua New Guinea

    There was a time when it seemed Papua New Guinea had managed to dodge a bullet.  Instances of SARS-CoV-2 were minimal, along with its disease, COVID-19.  Through 2020, the country of eight million people recorded a mere 900 cases.  The World Health Organization praised the PNG government in a September 2020 news release in “taking the threat of the pandemic seriously with an all-of-government approach in strengthening the country’s health system and engaging communities to keep them safe from the virus.”

    Officials acknowledged that a spike in cases could impair the medical system, despite the fact that three-quarters of the population are under the age of 35.  While the elderly population is small, the large number of youthful members poses the problem of asymptomatic transmission.  “We know that about 15% of COVID-19 cases will need some form of hospital care,” stated Dr Gary Nou, an important figure in the COVID-19 response in the National Capital District.  “If 10,000 people get sick – that’s about 1,500 people needing care.  This can easily overwhelm our health system.”

    Last month, Nou found himself working to a state of exhaustion in the Rita Flynn Sporting Complex in Port Moresby.  The complex had become a centre of treatment and testing, taking in moderate and mild coronavirus cases.  He concluded that a nightmare was unfolding.  “The workload is normally a lot, we have one doctor per 14,000 people, that’s our doctor to patient ratio.”  The health system, he gloomily observed, was now in a “perpetual state of disaster”.

    Currently, the number of coronavirus cases has almost reached 9,800 with 89 deaths recorded.  But these figures may well be skewed.  Moses Laman of the Papua New Guinea Institute of Medical Research told Devex at the start of this month that the figure of 100,000 was “closer to reality” given that 1 in 5 tests returned a positive result.  “That tells us there is widespread community transmission.”  Australian Doctors International’s Mimi Zilliacus does little to dissuade on that score, noting that minimal testing has taken place in the provinces.  “Lots of provincial governments have been reluctant to act, even when the response from the central government has ramped up.”

    At the start of this month, the PNG Epidemic Response Group, an alliance comprising medical research institutes, NGOs, professional services and Australian churches, warned of an impending calamity, urging the Australian government to “immediately allocate one million of its domestically produced vaccines to PNG now, along with accompanying technical assistance and support for the PNG government and communities to address vaccine hesitancy and distribution.”

    Concerning is the number of health workers being infected, a result largely due to a crawling vaccination program.  PNG’s Health Minister Jelta Wong promises that “558,000 doses of the AstraZeneca vaccine will be made available to Papua New Guineans” by June, though she could not muster much certainty on the timing.

    Structural problems are also bound to blight any vaccination distribution, not least because most of the country exists in a state of electricity deprivation.  In parts of the world “where electricity access is poor,” note three authors in The Conversation, “refrigeration of vaccines during transport and storage may prove very difficult.”

    The rash of cases in PNG has done enough to worry the World Health Organization (WHO).  Its Director-General, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, was gloomy at a virtual press conference on April 16.  The numbers might have been “smaller than other countries” but the increase was worryingly sharp.  PNG was, he argued, “a perfect example of why vaccine equity is so important.” The country had held COVID-19 “at bay for so long” but faced a rise in infections, fatigue towards social restrictions, low levels of immunity in the population and a fragile health system.

    This has also worried Australia, a country so often inclined to treat PNG with a mixture of splitting headache, condescension and hopeless charity.  Ian Kemish, former Australian High Commissioner to the country, calls it Australia’s “blind spot” despite PNG being home to some 20,000 Australians.  The former diplomat is unabashed in stressing the virtue of self-interest, which he calls “an important motivator of public attention”.  What is good for PNG, he unequivocally asserts, is also good for Australia.

    Kemish even goes so far as to praise representatives of Australian mining, with their “world-class testing and treatment protocols” (they can, the implication goes, teach the natives a thing or two).  In such praise, he chooses to avoid the obvious question: that PNG’s heavy reliance on mining provided another avenue for coronavirus to enter the country and thrive.  A stream of revenue may well have also constituted a viral route.

    The Australian Council for International Development is blunter.  As Marc Purcell, its chief executive, stated with a note of alarm, any virus mutations in PNG threatened “to undermine the Australian vaccines program.”  (At this stage, there is not much to undermine: Australia’s vaccination program remains incipient, tardy and barely worth a mention.)

    Canberra’s lack of a coherent vaccination strategy and lamentable planning has meant that parts of northern Australia are vulnerable to possible infection.  Proximity to PNG is a factor.  Of particular concern are the residents of the Torres Strait, their health potentially fragile to the ravages of the virus.  In the words of Bill Bowtell, famed for his role behind Australia’s successful HIV-AIDS response, “The Torres Strait is paying the same price as the rest of Australia for a lack of coherent planning about supply and then obviously distribution.”

    Queensland deputy premier Steven Miles has expressed a growing worry from the view of the state government.  “There are islands in the Torres Strait where you can see PNG from the beaches and where it is very common for people to travel for traditional trade purposes between PNG and the Torres Strait islands”.  It was essential to “get as many of those folk that we know are vulnerable vaccinated as quickly as we can.”

    In late March, Australia donated a paltry 8,000 doses while 132 thousand doses from the COVAX facility arrived last week.  Concerns remain with the use of the AstraZeneca vaccine, given the bad press that has enveloped it regarding instances of rare blood clotting.  The road ahead for PNG looks bumpy and more than a touch vicious.

    This article was posted on Monday, April 19th, 2021 at 2:54am and is filed under Australia, COVID-19, Papua New Guinea.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Recognition of Palestine is ‘Symbolic’ but also Critical: The Australian Case

    Australia’s Labor Party’s recognition of Palestine as a State on March 30 is a welcomed position, though it comes with many caveats.

    Pro-Palestinian activists are justified to question the sincerity of the ALP’s stance and whether Australia’s Labor is genuinely prepared to fully adopt this position should they form a government following the 2022 elections.

    The language of the amendment regarding the recognition of Palestine is quite indecisive. While it commits the ALP to recognize Palestine as a State, it “expects that this issue will be an important priority for the next Labor government”. ‘Expecting’ that the issue would be made an ‘important priority’ is not the same as confirming that the recognition of Palestine is resolved, should Labor take office.

    Moreover, the matter has been an ‘important priority’ for the ALP for years. In fact, similar language was adopted in the closing session of the Labor conference in December 2018, which supported “the recognition and right of Israel and Palestine to exist as two states within secure and recognized borders,” while adding this important clause: The ALP “calls on the next Labor government to recognize Palestine as a State”.

    Unfortunately for Labor, they lost the May 2019 elections, where the Liberal Party maintained the majority, again forming a government under the leadership of Scott Morrison.

    Morrison was the Prime Minister of Australia when, in 2018, the ALP adopted what was clearly a policy shift on Palestine. In fact, it was Morrison’s regressive position on Israel that supposedly compelled Labor to develop a seemingly progressive position on Palestine. Nine days after former US President, Donald Trump, defied international law by officially recognizing Jerusalem as the capital of Israel – and subsequently relocating the US embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem – Morrison flirted with the idea as well, hoping to enlist the support of the pro-Israel lobbies in Australia prior to the elections.

    However, Morrison did not go as far as Trump, by refraining from moving his country’s embassy to the occupied city. Instead, he developed a precarious – albeit still illegal – position where he recognized West Jerusalem as Israel’s capital, promising to move his country’s “embassy to West Jerusalem when practical, in support of, and after, final-status determination.”

    Canberra, however, did take ‘practical’ steps, including a decision to establish a defense and trade office in Jerusalem and proceeded to look for a site for its future embassy.

    Morrison’s self-serving strategy remains a political embarrassment for Australia, as it drew the country closer to Trump’s illegal, anti-Palestinian stance. While the vast majority of United Nations member states maintained a unified position regarding the illegality of the Israeli occupation of Palestine, asserting that the status of Jerusalem can only be determined based on a negotiated agreement, the Australian government thought otherwise.

    As Palestinians, Arabs and other nations mobilized against Australia’s new position, the ALP came under pressure to balance out the Liberal party’s agenda, seen as blindly supportive of military occupation and apartheid.

    Since the ALP lost the elections, their new policy on Palestine could not be evaluated. Now, according to their latest policy conference conclusion, this same position has been reiterated, although with some leeway, that could potentially allow Labor to reverse or delay that position, once they are in power.

    Nonetheless, the Labor position is an important step for Palestinians in their ‘legitimacy war’ against the Israeli occupation.

    In a recent interview with Professor Richard Falk, former UN Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territories, the international law expert explained the need to “distinguish symbolic politics from substantive politics”.

    “In the colonial wars that were fought after 1945, the side that won usually was the side that won what I call the legitimacy war, which is the ‘symbolic battlefield’, so to speak, and maintain the principled position that was in accord with the anti-colonial flow of history,” Falk said.

    Practically, this means that, often, the militarily weaker side which may lose numerous military battles could ultimately win the war. This was as true in the case of Vietnam in 1975 as it was in South Africa in 1994. It should also be true in the case of Palestine.

    This is precisely why pro-Israeli politicians, media pundits and organizations are fuming in response to the ALP’s recognition of Palestine. Among the numerous angry responses, the most expressive is the position of Michael Danby. He was quoted by Australian Jewish News website as saying that ALP leaders, Anthony Albanese and Richard Marles, have done more than adopting the pro-Palestinian position of former British Labor leader, Jeremy Corbyn, by also adopting “his Stalinist methods by suppressing debate on the foreign policy motions”.

    Israel and its supporters fully understand the significance of Falk’s ‘legitimacy war’. Indeed, Israel’s military superiority and complete dominance over occupied Palestinians may allow it to sustain its military occupation on the ground a while longer, but it does very little to advance its moral position, reputation and legitimacy.

    The fact that ALP’s position advocates a two-state solution – which is neither just nor practical – should not detract from the fact that the recognition of Palestine is still a stance that can be utilized in the Palestinian quest for legitimizing their struggle and delegitimizing Israel’s apartheid.

    Falk’s theory on ‘substantive politics’ and ‘symbolic politics’ applies here, too. While calling for defunct two-states is part of the substantive politics that is necessitated by international consensus, the symbolism of recognizing Palestine is a crucial step in dismantling Israel’s monopoly over the agenda of the West’s political elites. It is an outright defeat of the efforts of pro-Israeli lobbies.

    Politicians, anywhere, cannot possibly win the legitimacy war for Palestinians, or any other oppressed nation. It is the responsibility of the Palestinians and their supporters to impose their moral agenda on the often self-serving politicians so that the symbolic politics may someday become substantive. The ALP recognition of Palestine is, for now, mere symbolism. If utilized correctly, through pressure, advocacy and mobilization, it could turn into something meaningful in the future.  This is not the responsibility of Labor, but of Palestinians themselves.

    This article was posted on Friday, April 16th, 2021 at 1:09pm and is filed under Apartheid, Australia, Diplomacy, Donald Trump, Elections, Israel/Palestine, Jerusalem, Land Theft, Occupation, Palestine, Politics, Zionism.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Nimble Failure: The Australian COVID-19 Vaccination Program

    “I am not going to be talking about numbers today,” Australia’s Chief Medical Officer Paul Kelly told Australia’s Radio National on April 12.  This echoed suggestions from the Australian Prime Minister, Scott Morrison, who had adopted the position that Australia best forget meeting any clear vaccination targets.  Having left battling the pandemic to State governments, the Federal government has found itself unable to execute its program, if one dare call it that.

    Part of the monumental failings of the government can be put down to its stubbornness in prioritising the use of one vaccine.  AstraZeneca was meant to be the vaccine wonder, the Godhead, the miraculous deliverer.  CSL, Australia’s only vaccine manufacturer, was given the task of producing the majority of 54 million ordered doses at its Broadmeadows factory in Melbourne.  Many of those now risk being essentially useless.

    AstraZeneca’s product has been plagued by a profile that has become a ballooning public relations nightmare.  While various medical authorities in Europe delayed the application of jabs fearing a possible link between the vaccine and a rare blood-clotting syndrome, Australia looked on with goggle-eyed wonder, insisting that no pause was necessary.  Administrative objectives took priority over medical ones.

    Last week, Morrison’s medical advisers made things even more trying by suggesting that the AstraZeneca vaccine be ruled out for those under 50.  In a media release on April 8 by the Department of Health Secretary Brendan Murphy and Chief Medical Officer Kelly, it was revealed that they had “received very important advice” from the Australian Technical Advisory Group on Immunisation (ATAGI).  ATAGI had been considering European and US findings regarding any possible link between the AstraZeneca vaccine and any possible cause of “thrombosis with thrombocytopenia” characterised by “blood clots with low platelet counts.”

    In Europe, one in every 250,000 people who had received AstraZeneca had been diagnosed with the rare blood clot condition.  But Australia had not been spared, with one patient suffering thrombosis  and a low platelet count after being vaccinated on March 22.

    ATAGI had recommended that those under 50 years of age should take the COVID-19 Pfizer vaccine instead.  “This recommendation is based on the increasing risk of severe outcomes from COVID-19 in older adults – and hence a higher benefit from vaccination – and a potentially increased risk of ‘thrombosis with thrombocytopenia’ following AstraZeneca vaccination among those aged under 50.”

    The advisory group also recommended, obliquely, that the AstraZeneca vaccine might still be used for adults aged under 50 in cases “where the benefits clearly outweigh the risk for that individual” and the individual in question had made “an informed decision based on an understanding of the risks and benefits.”  Patients, it would seem, beware.

    Ominously, the health officers had to accept that the decision to accept the ATAGI advice would have “implications for the vaccine rollout program.”  One of them was already in evidence by the end of last week.  Victoria’s Department of Health was taking few chances.  “Until updated consent forms and consumer information are available from the Commonwealth Department of Health, and immunisation teams have been familiarised with these materials, it is advised that the AstraZeneca COVID-19 is not administered to eligible persons aged under 50 years.”

    Those who had made vaccination appointments for April 9 at the Royal Exhibition building in Melbourne were denied the jab.  “They just turned me away,” St. John Ambulance employee Athena Stathoulas explained to the ABC.  “I had no idea it was for 50s and over. I had no notification.”

    The Morrison government has been scrambling.  The Prime Minister announced on Friday that Australia had secured a further 20 million Pfizer vaccine doses, in addition to current orders for 20 million.  He tried to distract critics by noting that 170 million doses of vaccines in total, spanning deals with Pfizer, AstraZeneca, Novavax and COVAX, had been secured.  (Delivery has been quite another matter.)

    None of this could conceal the fact that vaccination timetables had been shredded.  An October deadline had been proposed for all Australians wishing to be vaccinated to receive at least one dose.  Prior to that, the government had dreamily suggested a target of 4 million vaccinated Australian adults, with all remaining adults being finished by October.  On April 8, Morrison emphasised “uncertainties” and “many, many variables” that doomed any coherent planning.  “This is not a certain world and we’re not on our own.  The whole world is dealing with the same uncertainty.”

    Government incompetence has also taken on a patriotic dimension. Stupidity can be forgivable, if it is shown to be defending the national interest.  Agriculture Minister David Littleproud is a startling example of this, refusing to consider how ordering other vaccines might ameliorate the problem.  Having not consulted the entire Australian population on the matter, he could confidently tell Channel Nine that he did not “think any Australian would want the Chinese vaccine or the Sputnik vaccine.”  He spoke of an approach “calm and methodical about making sure that we give the best vaccine with confidence, and however long it takes”.

    The National COVID-19 Commission, through member Jane Halton, is also of the same view.  “The trick now is for people to calm down a little bit and get back to basics.”  Prizer would be the stand-in hero here.  Think, warbles Halton, that “there will be 40 million doses in total” of it.

    The current state of calm, understanding of basics, and methodical application means that a further two years will be required for Australians to be fully vaccinated.  Daily tallies such as 27,209 are a far cry from the suggested number put forth by epidemiologist Mary-Louise McClaws, who opines that a total between 100,000 and 120,000 would be eminently more suitable.

    AstraZeneca’s future is not promising in other respects.  The European Medicine Agency is currently reviewing reports on a possible cause of capillary leak syndrome.  Other drug titans are also not being spared scrutiny, with Johnson & Johnson’s own Janssen vaccine potentially being tarnished by the same blood clot problem.  “At present, no clear casual relationship has been established between these rare events and the Janssen COVID-19 vaccine,” stated the company in an email.

    The damage, certainly in terms of public relations and the vaccination program, deepens.  But in Australia, the issue cuts deeper.  Bureaucratic incompetence has become the Siamese twin of unoriginal selections and poor supply lines.  With the State governments having performed the lion’s share of the work protecting populations from COVID-19, the Federal government has shown various, fabulous ways of soiling the stable.  A near future of closed borders, snap lockdowns and an increasingly enfeebled economy, seems likely.

    This article was posted on Sunday, April 11th, 2021 at 9:12pm and is filed under Australia, COVID-19, Public Relations, Vaccines.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Fatuous Defence: Australia’s Guided Missile Plans

    Even in times of pandemic crises, some things never change.  While Australia gurgles and bumbles slowly with its COVID-19 vaccine rollout, there are other priorities at stake.  Threat inflators are receiving much interest in defence, and the media is feeding on it with a drunken enthusiasm.  We live in a dangerous environment, and think-tankers, parliamentarians and commentators are starting to get a sweet taste for imminent conflict.

    The latest instalment in this pitiable train towards conflict was revealed in Canberra last month.  Australia, it seems, wants to make its own guided missiles.  In a joint statement, the Prime Minister and Ministers for Industry and Defence outlined the enterprise.  “The Morrison government will accelerate the creation of a (AU)$1 billion Sovereign Guided Weapons Enterprise, boosting skilled jobs and helping secure Australia’s sovereign defence capabilities.”

    Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison outlined his views in a media release on March 31.  “Creating our own sovereign capability on Australian soil is essential to keep Australians safe, while also providing thousands of local jobs in business right across the defence supply chain.”

    In making the announcement, he opted for a chalk and cheese comparison. “As the COVID-19 pandemic has shown, having the ability for self-reliance, be it in vaccine development or the defence of Australia, is vital to meeting our own requirements in a changing global environment.”  That specious idea ignores the point that the weapons are going to be made, not by Australian arms companies (they can barely even manage any credible local production) but by foreign entities.

    Australia’s Department of Defence is on the hunt for a “strategic industry partner”, which, in all likelihood will be one of the giants such as Raytheon Australia, BAE Systems Australia or Lockheed Martin Australia.  The mere fact that such companies have tagged Australia at the end of their antipodean corporate base is no reassurance about a local killing capability.  But the newly appointed Defence Minister Peter Dutton gives the impression that the selection will be somehow competitive and balanced, promising to resort to a “Smart Buyer” process in picking the said partner.  Such smartness is bound to be bereft of any intelligence, as with previous procurement deals that go pear shaped within a matter of months.  (At this writing, the Australian-Naval Group future submarine contract is sinking under incompetence, disagreement and cost.)

    Dutton praises the idea of having an Australian base for the manufacture of such guided weapons, as they will “not only benefit and enhance our ADF operational capacity but will ensure we have adequate supply of weapon stock holdings to sustain combat operations if global supply chains are disrupted.”  Given Australia’s poor performance in coping with disruptions to the supply of COVID-19 vaccines, despite the propaganda about sovereign capability in that field, this is actually mildly amusing.

    We already know from government mutterings that the US will be crucial (when is it not?) in feathering the Australian project, giving it a faux independence.  The Australian Strategic Policy Institute, heavily commercialised, compromised and bound to the US-Australian insecurity complex, prattles constantly about the need to get involved with useless machinery that only serves to inspire the arms manufacturers of other countries.

    Take this number from Andrew Davies from last month, thinking that it might not be such a bad idea to get on board the hypersonic weapons bandwagon.  Australia, he suggested, “might well join” the major powers in acquiring them.  The country, he claims, has “some world class researchers”.  The nub: Australians have been “in joint programs with the US for over 20 years.”

    The announcement about guided missiles excited ASPI’s director of defence, strategy and national security, Michael Shoebridge, a man who has been salivating for a proper war for some few years now.  The latest initiative was “being driven by the two Cs, China and COVID.”  Shoebridge fantasises about long-range anti-ship missiles and new vehicles with missile capabilities.  In June last year, he warned of “a glaring gap we must close in our ability to supply the Australian Defence Force with precision munitions – notably missiles.  Advanced missiles give the militaries the edge in combat.”  His nightmare: Australian impotence in the face of supply disruptions; a slow production rate from overseas sources; abandonment.  This is particularly more acute given that Australia is no longer interested in peacekeeping missions.  Blame, he says, “the deteriorating strategic environment in our region” – a real favourite expression in the Prime Minister’s office and ASPI.

    With Canberra making it clear that it wishes to continue a hissing and booing campaign against China even as it ingratiates Washington, the entire process has a heavy tang of needless stupidity.  As to whether it actually benefits Australia in any concrete sense, a clue is offered by Dutton.  “We will work closely with the United States on this important initiative to ensure that we understand how our enterprise can best support both Australia’s needs and the growing needs of our most important military partner.”  If that is sovereign capability and independence, one hates to think what vassalage looks like.

    This article was posted on Thursday, April 8th, 2021 at 12:00am and is filed under Australia.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Australia Struggles to Find an Independent Voice

    Australia has always struggled to present an independent foreign policy to the world. For example, during its early days as a British colony its soldiers fought in the Crimean war in the mid 19th century, although it would be impossible to identify any Australian interest in that conflict. World War One saw a similar eagerness to die on behalf of the British Empire. To this day the most solemn day in the Australian calendar is 25th April, ANZAC Day, when Australian and New Zealand troops were sacrificed by their incompetent British officers to a hopeless campaign in Turkey during World War One.

    The same saga was repeated during World War II when Australian troops were rushed to North Africa to fight Rommel’s desert army. They were only withdrawn from that theatre following the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, when defending home territory from the Japanese superseded defending Britain in its European war.

    The fall of Singapore to the Japanese had a profound effect on Australian military thinking. Foremost was the realisation that they could no longer rely on Britain for their safety.  Rather than formulating a plan for having a uniquely Australian tinge to their defence, Australia simply switched its allegiance from the British to the Americans. That allegiance has continued to the present day and is essentially a bipartisan affair, with both the major political parties swearing undying allegiance to the Americans.

    What did not change from the days of allegiance to a participation in Britain’s wars, was an affinity simply transferred to the Americans to join their wars, regardless of the merits, military or otherwise, of doing so.

    Thus Australia was an eager participant in the first post-World War II exercise in American imperialism when it joined the war in Korea. Australian troops later joined in the invasion of North Korea, contrary to the terms of the United Nations resolution authorising the conflict. After the Chinese joined the war when the western forces reached the North Korea – China border, they were quickly expelled back to the southern portion of the Korean peninsula.

    As is well known, the Americans used their aerial domination to bomb the North until the armistice was finally signed in 1953. During that air war every city in the North suffered severe damage. More than 600,000 civilians died, which was greater than the military losses of around 400,000. To this day the war remains technically alive as no peace treaty has been signed. Of the 17,000 Australian troops that served in Korea, there were 340 fatalities and more than 1400 injured, a comparatively small number for a war that lasted three years.

    In 1962 Australian troops arrived in South Vietnam and remained there until January 1973 when they were withdrawn by the Whitlam Labor government. It was Australia’s longest war up until that time. The withdrawal of Australian troops by the Whitlam government incensed the Americans, on whose behalf they were there. The withdrawal drew the enmity of the Americans and was a major factor in the American role in the overthrow of the Whitlam government in November 1975. It is a fact barely acknowledged in Australian writing on the demise of the Whitlam government. It did, however, have a profound effect on Australian political and military thinking. Since November 1975 there has been no recognisable Australian difference from United States belligerence throughout the world.

    The next miscalculation was Australia joining the United States led war in Afghanistan. That is now Australia’s longest war, rapidly approaching 20 years of involvement with no sign or political talk about withdrawing. It is a war that has largely passed out of mainstream media discussion. This ignorance was briefly disrupted by revelations in late 2020 that Australian troops had been involved in war crimes in Afghanistan, specifically, the killing of innocent Afghanistan civilians.

    The brief publicity given to this revelation rapidly passed and Australia’s involvement in its longest war once more faded from public view. The mainstream media remains totally silent on Australia’s involvement on behalf of the Americans in protecting the poppy crop, source of 90% of the world’s heroin supply and a major source of uncountable illicit income for the CIA.

    Australia’s next foreign intervention on behalf of the Americans was in the equally illegal invasion of Iraq in 2003. They have simply ignored demands by the Iraqi government in 2020 that all uninvited foreign troops should leave. The involvement of Australian troops in that country, and indeed in adjoining Syria where they have been since at least 2015 is simply ignored by the mainstream media.

    Australia also plays a role in the United States war machine through the satellite facility at Pine Gap in the Northern Territory. That base is one of a number of United States military facilities in the country, another topic that is deemed by the mainstream media as being unfit for public discussion.

    Another unsung role of the Australian Navy is to be part of the United States confrontation with China in the South China Sea where they protect so-called freedom of navigation exercises, despite the complete absence of any evidence of Chinese interference with civilian navigation in those waters. Equally unexplained is the Australian Navy’s presence in the narrow Straits of Malacca, a vital Chinese export waterway.

    Last year the Trump administration resurrected the “gang of four” that is, India, Japan, the United States and Australia, a blatantly anti-China grouping designed to put pressure on the Chinese government in the Indo Pacific region. The measure is doomed to fail, not least because both India and Japan have more attractive opportunities as part of the burgeoning cooperation in trade among multiple countries in the Asia-Pacific who see better opportunities arising from a friendly relationship with China than the blatantly antagonistic options offered by the Americans.

    Australia seems impervious to these signals. It has already suffered major setbacks to its trade with China, not to mention a diplomatic cold shoulder. The political leadership is silent on this development, perhaps unable to grasp the implications of its changing relationship with China. The inability of the Labor Opposition to grasp the implications of the consequences of Australia clinging to the fading American coattails is of profound concern.

    All the signs are that the relationship with its largest trading partner, by a big margin, will continue to deteriorate. Australians seem unable or unwilling to grasp the lesson that its economic problems are intimately linked to its subservient role to the United States.

    There is every indication that their fortunes in Asia will sink together.

    This article was posted on Tuesday, April 6th, 2021 at 1:45am and is filed under Afghanistan, Australia, China, Espionage/”Intelligence”, India, Iraq, Japan, Korea, Militarism, North Korea, Singapore, Surveillance, Syria, Trade, United Kingdom, United States, US Military Bases, Viet Nam, War Crimes, World War One, World War Two.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Priti Patel and the Death of Asylum

    Nothing makes better sense to the political classes than small time demagoguery when matters turn sour. True, the United Kingdom might well be speeding ahead with vaccination numbers, and getting ever big-headed about it, but there is still good reason to distract the voters.  Coronavirus continues to vex; the economy continues to suffer. In February, the Office of Statistics revealed that Britain’s economy had shrunk by 9.9%.  The last time such a contraction was experienced was in 1709, when a contraction of 13% was suffered as a result of the Great Frost which lasted for three devastating months.

    With Brexit Britain feeling alone, it is time to resort to mauling targets made traditional during the 2016 campaign to exit the European Union: the asylum seeker, the refugee and anyone assisting in that enterprise.  And the person best suited to doing so is the Home Secretary, Priti Patel, who outlined the government’s New Plan for Immigration on March 24th.  It has three objectives with one overarching punitive theme “to better protect and support those in genuine need of asylum.”  The authenticity of that need will be aided by deterring “illegal entry into the UK, thereby breaking the business model of criminal trafficking networks and protecting the lives of those they endanger”.  Those with “no right to be” in the UK will also be more easily “removed”.

    It is in the nature of such policies to conceal the punitive element by extolling virtues.  “The UK accepted more refugees through planned resettlement schemes than any other country in Europe in the period 2015-2019 – the fourth highest resettlement schemes globally after the USA, Canada and Australia,” reads the policy statement. “The UK also welcomed 29,000 people through the refugee family reunion scheme between 2015 and 2019. More than half of these were children.”

    This self-praise ignores the inconvenient fact that the UK received fewer applications for asylum than European states such as France and Germany in 2020.  According to the UNHCR, both countries received four times the number in 2020.  “The number of arrivals in the UK in 2020,” remarks academic Helen O’Nions, “was actually down 18% on the previous year.”

    It does not take long, however, to identify and inflate the threats: people crossing the English channel in their “small boats reached record levels, with 8,500 … arriving this way” in 2020.  Sinister imputations are made: 87% of those arriving in small boats were male.  In 2019, 32,000 illegal attempts were made to enter the UK, but foiled in Northern France while 16,000 illegal arrivals were detected in the UK.

    The Home Office laments the rapid increase of asylum claims; decisions cannot be made “quickly”; “case loads are growing to unsustainable levels”.  Never mind the UN Refugee Convention and human rights: what matters is bureaucratic efficiency.  To achieve that, Patel hopes to “stop illegal arrivals gaining immediate entry into the asylum system if they have travelled through a safe country – like France.”  Any arrivals doing so could not be said to be “seeking refuge from imminent peril”.  Stiffer sentences are also suggested for those aiding asylum.  “Access to the UK’s asylum system should be based on need, not on the ability to pay people smugglers.”

    Much of what the Home Office makes of this is nonsense.  It entails a fantasy about a model cut, idealised asylum seeker: those with state documents from the persecuting state, clearly of the identifiable sort, all morally sound.  The murkier reality necessitates deception as an indispensable part of the process.  To not have documents makes travel impossible.  Alternative routes and means are therefore required.

    The threat to relocate and refuse those seeking asylum would also breach the UK’s own Human Rights Act of 1998, obligating the state to prevent people from being returned to places where they are at the risk of torture, inhuman, degrading treatment or cruel and unusual punishment.  That principle is also a cardinal feature of the Refugee Convention.

    The view from those who actually have more than a passing acquaintance with the field is vastly different from Patel’s.  Politely, some 454 immigration scholars in the UK have told the Home Secretary in an open letter that she does not know what she is talking about.  The New Plan, for instance, may have 31 references, but “there is just one reference to research evidence, a research paper on refugee integration.”  The undersigned scholars suggest that Patel look more deeply, as the plans being proposed “not only circumvent international human rights law, but are also based on claims which are completely unfounded in any body of research evidence.”

    The scholars also note that asylum seekers and refugees lack safe and legal routes, with countries across Europe, North American and Australasia going “to huge efforts and massive expense in recent decades to close down access to the right to asylum.”

    The markings of the New Plan resemble, all too closely, the Australian approach of discrimination which has become an exemplar of how to undermine the right to asylum: an obsession with targeting those people smuggling “gangs” and associated business rackets, merely code for targeting those fleeing persecution; distinguishing the method of arrival in order to demonise the plight of the asylum seeker; the decision that, irrespective of the claims of asylum, no sanctuary would ever be given to certain individuals because they chose to jump a phantom queue and not know their place.

    The open letter also notes the “distinct and troubling echoes” of “the Australian Temporary Protection Visa programme and the vilification of people with no option but to travel through irregular means to flee persecution and seek sanctuary.”

    Another unsavoury aspect of the British turn in refugee policy towards the antipodean example can be gathered by the possible use of offshore detention centres.  Canberra relies on the liberal use of concentration camps on remote sites in the Pacific, centres of calculated cruelty that serve to destroy the will of those whose governments have already done much to encourage their flight.  The official justification is one of killing asylum seekers with kindness: We saved you from almost certain drowning at sea, only to seal you within the confines of legal purgatory.  In the New Plan, one senses a touch of envy for it.

    In October last year, it was revealed that the UK Prime Minister’s office was considering the detention of asylum seekers in places as varied as Moldova, Morocco and Papua New Guinea.  According to documents obtained by The Guardian, the Foreign Office had been charged with a task by Downing Street to “offer advice on possible options for negotiating an offshore asylum processing facility similar to the Australian model in Papua New Guinea and Nauru”.  Patel herself had flirted with the idea of establishing centres at Ascension and St. Helena, though she has had to content herself with ill-suited military barracks on the mainland that facilitated the spread of COVID-19.

    Alison Mountz, in The Death of Asylum, makes much of this transformation of the island from a point of transit to that of hostile containment.  From field research conducted in Italy’s Lampedusa Island, Australia’s Christmas Island and the US territories of Guam and Saipan, Mountz argues that “the strategic use of islands to detain people in search of protection – to thwart human mobility through confinement – is part of the death of asylum.”  Officials such as Patel are happy to help matters along.

    This article was posted on Sunday, April 4th, 2021 at 12:14am and is filed under Asylum seekers, Australia, Discrimination, Migration/Migrants, Nauru, Papua New Guinea, Refugees, United Kingdom.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • The Adani Business Formula: Dealing with Myanmar’s Military

    Corporate morality can be a flexible thing.  Some companies see tantalising dollar signs afloat in the spilt blood of civilians and dissidents.  Military governments, however trigger crazed, offer ideal opportunities; potentially, corners can be cut, regulations relaxed.  The Adani Group has shown itself to be particularly unscrupulous in this regard.

    In many ways, it is fitting.  The group’s record in a range of areas suggests that the profit motive soars above any other consideration.  Environmentally, Adani is an irresponsible, wretched beast.  A shonky Adani coal ship, the MV Rak, sank off the coast of Mumbai in August 2011 with devastating effects on marine life, the fishing industry, beaches and tourism.  Its lacklustre response to dealing with the mess suggested environmental vandalism of the highest order.

    In terms of employment practices, the company has been found to underpay its workforce and use child labour in the bargain.  As for corporate strategy, Adani is happy to spread largesse for favours.  The illegal export of 7.7 million tonnes of iron ore between 2006 and 2010 mobilised the company in a campaign of suppression and concealment.  The Ombudsman of the Indian state of Karnataka took an interest in Adani’s conduct and found a vast bribery enterprise covering local politicians, customs officials, members of the police force, the State Pollution Control Board, the Port Department and the Weight and Measurement Department.

    So why stop there?  With the killing of demonstrators in Myanmar well underway, human rights groups and activists turned their sharp focus towards Adani’s record on port investment and its involvement with the military junta.  The grounds of concern were already laid in 2019, when the UN Independent International Fact-Finding Mission on Myanmar listed Adani Ports and its commercial links with the military conglomeration, the Myanmar Economic Corporation (MEC).

    The previous year, the UN Mission had issued a call for the top military commanders of Myanmar to be investigated and prosecuted for alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity against ethnic groups in the states of Arakan (Rakhine), Kachin and Shan and for alleged genocide against the Rohingya of Arakan state.  The fact finding mission was stern in judgment: “no business enterprise active in Myanmar or trading or investing in businesses in Myanmar should enter into an economic or financial relationship with the security forces of Myanmar, in particular the Tatmadaw, or any enterprise owned or controlled by them or their individual members”.

    The International Criminal Court has also authorised the Prosecutor to investigate alleged atrocities by the military, including deportation and other inhumane acts and the persecution of the Rohingya inside Myanmar.  While Myanmar is not a State Party to the court’s jurisdiction, Bangladesh, which received the bulk of the displaced Rohingya, is.

    In Port of Complicity: Adani Ports in Myanmar, a March 2021 report by the Australian Centre for International Justice and Justice For Myanmar, the authors focus on Adani Port’s commercial ties with the MEC military conglomerate.  In May 2019, Adani Ports entered into an agreement to construct, operate and transfer land held by the MEC for 50 years in an investment that promises to run to US$290 million.  Land is being leased for the construction of the Ahlone International Port Terminal 2.  The very property in question is a source of concern.  “Due diligence obligations,” warn the authors, “would require Adani Ports to investigate whether the land is the subject of illegal appropriation by the military.”

    The report also draws upon documents obtained by Justice for Myanmar, revealing that Adani Ports’ subsidiary in Myanmar, the Adani Yangon International Terminal Company Limited, paid US$52 million to the MEC, including $30 million in land lease fees.  The rest constitute land clearance fees.

    Through its Australian arm, the Adani Group released a statement seeing little problem with the commercial deal with a military-run corporation, despite acknowledging arm embargoes and travel sanctions on important members of the junta.  Such facts did not “preclude investments in the nation or business dealings with corporations such as MEC”.  The company also “rejected insinuations that this investment is unethical or will compromise human rights”.

    In December 2020, Adani reiterated that understanding to the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, seeing no problems between ongoing arms embargoes and travel restrictions on “key members of the military”.  A more constructive reading of company intentions was encouraged.  “The Adani Group’s vision is to help build critical infrastructure for nations across key markets and help in propelling economic development and social impacts.”

    Following the February 1 coup, Adani issued a statement denying any engagement with the junta over the 2019 approval of the port.  “We categorically deny having engaged with military leadership while receiving this approval or thereafter.”  This was a curious version of events, given the July 2019 visit by a Myanmar military delegation led by Commander-in Chief Senior General Min Aung Hlaing to Adani Ports’ headquarters based in Mundra, India.  Ten days prior to the visit, the US State Department had targeted Min Aung Hlaing and three senior members of the military with travel bans, citing their “responsibility for gross human rights violations, including in extrajudicial killings in northern Rakhine State, Burma, during the ethnic cleansing of Rohingya”.

    The tour presented the general and his coterie a happy occasion for photo and video opportunities, many of which were posted on his personal website and the website of the Office of the Commander-in-Chief of Myanmar Defence Services.  Gifts were also exchanged between the CEO of Adani Ports, Kiran Adani, and the Senior General.

    Caught out by this howler, the company, through a spokesperson, attempted to minimise the significance of the meeting.  The general and his delegation were on an official visit to India; visiting Mundra was merely an informal matter.  “In 2019, the government of India hosted the Myanmar general Min Aung Hlaing and Mundra Port was only one such location out of the multiple sites on this visit”.

    The military regime in Myanmar is becoming the subject of interest in certain foreign capitals.  The Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) within the US Treasury has targeted the two main military holding companies, the MEC and Myanma Economic Holdings Company Limited (MEHL) with sanctions.  “These companies,” states the US Treasury, “dominate certain sectors of the economy, including trading, natural resources, alcohol, cigarettes, and consumer goods.” Various high ranking military officials, former and current, have links to the holding companies and their various subsidiaries.

    Superbly disingenuous, a spokesperson for Adani Ports has suggested watchfulness at this increasingly sordid picture: the company was “watching the situation in Myanmar carefully and will engage with the relevant authorities and stakeholders to seek their advice on the way forward”.  In what can only be regarded as an exercise in moral vacuity, the same spokesperson claimed that the Yangon International Terminal project was “an independent container terminal with no joint venture partners.”

    The Myanmar-Adani nexus comes with broader, blood-stained implications.  The company’s Australian operations in the Carmichael coal project in Queensland, long challenged by a determined grassroots effort, raises the question of ethical financing.  “The question for Australia and Australians is whether we want to be hosting a company that is contributing to the enrichment of the Myanmar military,” asks Chris Sidoti, an Australian lawyer who was on the 2019 UN Mission.  Investing in Adani was tantamount to the indirect financing of the Myanmar military.  “This is a question especially for sovereign wealth funds and pension funds that should have a highly ethical basis for their investment decisions.”  As ever, some room to hope.

    This article was posted on Thursday, April 1st, 2021 at 9:45pm and is filed under Australia, Environmental Vandalism, Ethnic Cleansing, India, Militarism, Myanmar, Rohingya.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Cancelling Art, Dark Mofo and the Offended Classes

    Last week, Australians found themselves delighting in another fit of cancel culture, this time in the art world.  Tasmania’s Dark Mofo art festival prides itself on being gritty but the mood was very much about removing any grit to begin with.  Interest centred on the project of Spanish artist Santiago Sierra, who had proposed soaking a Union Jack Flag “in the blood of its colonised territories”.  The blood would come by way of donations.  First Nation peoples “from countries claimed by the British Empire at some point in history, who reside in Australia” would furnish the liquid.

    Given what followed, festival organisers might have preferred one of Sierra’s other suggestions: a work that would have involved vast amounts of cocaine.  Social media outrage followed.  People purporting to speak for the offended, while also counting themselves as offended, railed and expectorated.  Festival curator Leigh Carmichael tried to be brave against the howling winds of disapproval.  “At this stage we will push on,” he told ABC Radio Hobart on March 23.  “Provided we can logistically make this work happen, we will.”  He acknowledged that, “These were very dangerous topics, they’re hard, they hurt.”  For criticisms that the work was being made by a Spanish artist, Carmichael was initially clear: to make work taboo for people from specific localities could constitute “a form of racism in itself.”  Then inevitable equivocation followed.  “This artist is about their experience and whether a Spanish artist has the right to weigh in, I don’t know.”

    Within a matter of hours, Carmichael’s position had collapsed: Sierra’s project was cut and put out to sea.  “We’ve heard the community’s response to Santiago Sierra’s Union Flag.”  Grovelling and capitulation before this all powerful community followed.  “We made a mistake, and take full responsibility.  The project will be cancelled.  We apologise to all First Nations people for any hurt that has been caused.  We are sorry.”

    David Walsh, Tasmanian founder of MONA (Museum of Old and New Art) and responsible for running the festival, was open to self-education and reflection, having not seen “the deeper consequences of this proposition”.  He had thought the work “would appeal to the usual leftie demographic.  I approved it without much thought (as has become obvious).”  A bit of old fashioned, censoring conservatism was called for.

    Brian Ritchie, bassist for the Violent Femmes and artistic director of Mona Foma, the museum’s summer festival, felt righteous, firstly, wanting to distance his own outfit as “a completely different and separate organisation” before weighing into rubbishing the cultural sensitivity credentials of the work and the artist.  “Exploiting people while claiming to protest on their behalf is intellectually void.  Stupid programming is aesthetically null.  Controversy outweighing the quality of the work is bad art.”

    The cancellation was approved by the bloated entities across the academy, certain ethnic groups and the professionally enraged.    Critique ranged from the identity of the artist (Spanish, foreigner, coloniser) to the merits of the work itself.  “A coloniser artist intending to produce art with the actual blood of colonised people is abusive, colonising and re-traumatising,” came the social worker assessment from novelist Claire G. Coleman.  “The idea is disgusting and terrible and should not have been considered.”

    If every traumatic, disgusting incident (rape, pillage, massacres, wars, the crucifixion) were to be considered a bad idea for representation, the canvasses best be left empty, the art shows barren.  Never depict, for instance, that Tasmania’s lands are blood soaked by European conquest.  Do not, as Australian artist Mike Parr did in June 2018, bury yourself beneath a busy street of the state capital Hobart to get to the hidden truth.  That way lies trauma.

    The art content commissars were also keeping close eye over how the depiction might have been properly staged, if it was even possible.  Such a contribution can be found in the journal Overland. “Simply stating or depicting that the beginnings of the Australian colony were brutal and bloody for Indigenous people is a passive act,” moaned the very selective Cass Lynch.  She demands, expects. “The concept on its own isn’t active as an agent of truth-telling, it doesn’t contain an indigenous vice or testimony, it has no nuance.  On its own, it leans into the glorification of the gore and the violence of colonisation.”  Blood, it would seem, is no indicator of truth.

    In such convulsions of faux sensitivity to the First Nations, the arts sector (for this is what it has become in Australia, a corporatized, sanitised cobbling of blandness, branding and safe bets) justified not merely the pulling of the piece, but that it should have ever been contemplated to begin with.  In the commentary on Sierra, the Indigenous peoples are spoken of in abstract and universal terms: they were hurt and all have one, monolithic voice; and “white curators” should have thought better in letting the project ever get off the ground.  Thinking in cultural police terms, Paola Balla asked “how this was allowed to be programmed in the first place?  And what structures support white curators to speak of Black traumas?”  Such questions are bound to embolden art vandals across the world keen on emptying every museum for being inappropriately informed about “power structures”.

    Ironically enough, in this swell of ranting about voices and representation, the artist in question was deprived of it.  Sierra, in a statement released on March 25, called treatment of his work “superficial and spectacular” and his own treatment as a “public lynching”.  His quotes had been misconstrued; he had been “left without a voice, without the capacity to explain and defend” his project.  He had hoped the blood-soaked Union Jack would inspire reflection “on the material on which states and empires are built” and reveal how “all blood is equally red and has the same consistency, regardless of the race or culture of the person supplying it”.

    Sierra’s shabby treatment did not go unnoticed.  Parr took issue with the festival organisers’ “cowardice and lack of leadership”.  Michael Mansell, Chair of the Aboriginal Land Council of Tasmania urged Carmichael to push on with the work.  “The artist challenges Tasmanians about whether Aboriginal lands were peacefully or violently taken, and uses the blood-smattered Union Jack to express his view.”  By all means disagree with the artist and even feel offended “but that cannot justify stifling the artist’s freedom of thought.”  A sinister result had followed from the cancellation of the project.  “The unintended consequence of the objectors is that the discussion about truth telling will now be ignored, put aside.”

    There are parallels in this fiasco with previous instances of rage over what can and cannot be depicted in the shallow art lands of the Antipodes.  The cultural police also took issue with Australian photographic artist Bill Henson in 2008 for his portrayals of children as sexual beings.  On May 22 that year, twenty Henson photographs featuring “naked children aged 12 and 13” were confiscated by police from Sydney’s Roslyn Oxley9 gallery.  Jason Smith of the Monash Gallery of Art defended Henson, claiming that his work “has consistently explored human conditions of youth, and examined a poignant moment between adolescence and adulthood”.

    Then Prime Minister Kevin Rudd was having none of it.  There were simply certain things you could not touch, that art should not enable you to understand.  Henson had erred into vice.  “Kids deserve to have the innocence of their childhood protected,” he spluttered.  Rudd found the photographs “absolutely revolting” despite having not seen them.  “Whatever the artistic view of the merits of that sort of stuff – frankly I don’t think there are any – just allow kids to be kids.”  Jenny Macklin, Minister for Families at the time, moralised before the Nine Network about how children were “just getting bombarded with sexualised images all the time, and it’s that sexualisation of children that I think is wrong.”  Now, just as then, artists have been put on notice.

    This article was posted on Sunday, March 28th, 2021 at 10:55pm and is filed under Australia, Censorship, Freedom of Expression/Speech, Hypocrisy, Imperialism, Indigenous Peoples, Resistance Art, Social media.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • The Geopolitics of Vaccine Nationalism and R&D: Perspectives from Australia

    “The eagle has landed”, said Australia’s federal Health Minister Greg Hunt on 15 February 2021 referring to the arrival of the first international shipment of Pfeizer’s Covid-19 vaccines in Australia. On the day which was supposed to be a vaccine response ‘D-day’ for Australia and to add a boost to the government’s approval ratings, the office of Australia’s Defence Minister Linda Reynolds got embroiled in a rape claim cover-up scandal, shaking the ruling Coalition and Parliament to its core. The Prime Minister Scott Morrison unsuccessfully tried to turn the domestic attention back to the vaccine roll-out which began in late February, despite media reports stating that one sixth of Australia’s vaccine supplies could be adversely affected by syringe shortages.

    According to the World Health Organization (WHO) based on data released on 5 March 2021, there were 79 vaccine candidates in clinical trials globally and 182 in pre-clinical development. The Australian Government has committed to securing several types of vaccines in four  “vaccine agreements” but the public will not have the choice of a jab. This comes despite serious concerns raised in Europe (in Italy, Norway and France) and South Africa about the use of Pfizer-BioNTech’s and/or Astrazeneca’s COVID-19 vaccines, which are the first-choice vaccines of the Australian Government to inoculate Australians. The Herald Sun recently reported that “the AstraZeneca vaccine will form the bulk of the government’s $3.3bn COVID-19 immunization program”. On 5 March, Italy became the first EU member to enact the EU regulation effectively blocking the shipment of 250,000 doses of AstraZeneca vaccine to Australia. Dr Omah Khorshid, President of the Australian Medical Association, described the move as “vaccine nationalism rearing its head“.

    Australia has already invested over $1 billion in the Melbourne-based CSL company that aims to manufacture at least 50 million doses of the University of Oxford/Astra Zeneca’s vaccine. It is unclear, however, why the Government did not extend enough support to other COVID-19 related projects such as domestic rapid tests manufacturing (developed by the Ellume private technology company from Queensland), which has signed a $302 million deal with the U.S. Government (in the context of the Biden Administration’s pandemic response plan), or the Australian vaccine candidate from South Australia jointly developed by Flinders University/Vaxine company – with a successful vaccine R&D with foreign government assistance (US and UK).

    Global vaccine wars: a blueprint for the future?

    The global ‘vaccine race’ has come to resemble a geopolitical arms competition, with medicine being the weapons and developed nations coming first.  This race risks derailing decades of efforts aimed at cooperation and dialogue, including in the Indo-Asia-Pacific region. Instead, old-time alliances and hostilities have been revived, back-door deals struck and the world’s poorest nations potentially left behind as the global titans—the U.S., Russia, China and the EU—battle it out with export restrictions while resorting to an increasingly heated war of words. Despite Australia’s part in joining the COVID-19 Vaccines Global Access (COVAX) Facility (investing $123 million), it is difficult to predict how ‘equitable’ the distribution of limited supplies of COVID-19 vaccines will be, as the global demand is likely to exceed supply for at least one year.

    Inoculation front-runners

    An unusual group of countries became the frontrunners in the inoculation race against the virus, Israel, Serbia, Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates. Serbia is currently the only country in the world to offer its citizens a unique smorgasbord of vaccines from different manufacturers and heavily relying on Artificial Intelligence modelling in the race against time in its COVID-19 battle (with a record daily infection rate exceeding 4,500). Major vaccines for people in Serbia to choose from are PfeizerBioNTech, Russia’s Sputnik V (marketed as ‘the first-registered vaccine against COVID-19’) and the China National Pharmaceutical Group’s Sinopharm. Serbian President also “gifted” a limited number of vaccines to neighbouring countries (North Macedonia and Bosnia-Herzegovina) and offered to inoculate Kosovo’s citizens in southern Serbia – with Pristina officially rejecting the ‘Eastern alternatives’ but still waiting to receive any Western-made vaccines. When asked by the national press on this state of affairs, Germany’s Chancellor Angela Merkel confirmed that an EU candidate state like Serbia is faring better on the vaccination front than Germany, citing Serbia’s access to the Russian and Chinese vaccines. Is it perhaps time to put geopolitics aside and look for joint cures for the biggest threat to humanity in over a century?

    Unanswered questions

    Australia provides an interesting example in the COVID-19 vaccine race. A middle power, a close ally of the United States with China as its biggest trade partner, and able, on the face of it, of having choices on which vaccines to access. One would think that Australians should be presented with options about which vaccine they would prefer to take in the ambitious government drive to inoculate most the population by 2021-22 worth more than $6 billion. Australia’s vaccination strategy keeps changing, with a looming question regarding the role of the military including in the broader region to support the Pacific Island nations. A recent funding boost (of $800 million) includes increasing the military’s response to pandemics and natural disasters—which raises troubling issues of military involvement in civilian roles.

    Despite the speed of events relating to COVID-19, more public and parliamentary scrutiny in Australia (as elsewhere) is needed in order to question whether the federal authorities have made best public health spending choices. The case of the Australian-based diagnostic company, Ellume, is particularly odd in this regard. The company found success in the United States with its rapid home testing COVID-19 kits, approved by the previous Trump Administration in mid-December 2020 for emergency use. Australia already missed out on becoming a manufacturing hub for Ellume’s COVID-19 testing kits as Ellume agreed to build a U.S.-based factory to supply more than 8.5 million kits to the North American market. The Australian government, however, showed little interest in its domestic use. This has all the hallmarks of freeriding on the US alliance.

    This has raised several unanswered questions: Why is there no wider choice of jab, given the existence of promising domestic vaccine candidates in clinical trials? What will happen if travelers inoculated overseas with a non-Western produced vaccine wanted to return to or visit Australia? Why are promising domestic research projects mostly overlooked in the broader funding model for COVID-19 response?

    It appears that Australia’s pharmaceutical giant CSL has been given a monopoly in the government’s COVID-19 response; its projects in the 2020 Federal Budget were allocated $1.7 billion (including the CSL’s development of an Australian vaccine with the University of Queensland (UQ), which failed in December 2020 as some Australian scientists predicted). Other projects such as the Vaxine-Flinders University R&D project from South Australia (whose lead researchers have consistently requested more federal funding) had to seek support from other governments, namely the U.S. and the UK. In terms of credentials, Vaxine developed the world’s first swine flu vaccine in 2009 as well as life-saving antivenom products (including vaccines) against bee sting and jack jumper ant sting allergy (amongst many other vaccine-related products). Could this “emerging trend” be part of a government “tactic” to attract more foreign funding for Australia’s R&D projects from allies such as the US and the UK while putting ‘all its eggs in one basket’, namely, the CSL project?

    Big Corporations: the biggest ‘winner’ from the Government’s COVID-19 response

    CSL was originally established in 1916 as the Commonwealth Serum Laboratories. In 1928, there was an incident linked to CSL in the Queensland town of Bundaberg in which 12 children died and others fell ill following an inoculation effort against diphtheria. This incident was later discussed in Parliament. CSL was privatized in the early 1990s under the federal Labor Government. It now has over 160,000 shareholders with a revenue of $11.1 billion in 2019. This could increase in 2021–22 following a large financial injection by the Morrison Government which promises to better position Australia in the global vaccine race by manufacturing vaccines on home soil. There were media reports about members of the Australian Parliament having vested interests through (declared) share-holdings in corporate giants like CSL before the federal government declared its support for CSL.

    Australia’s ambitions to effectively develop, produce and export an original, Australian-made vaccine seem, at best, half-hearted. After all, the federal government invested in the UQ-CSL venture despite credible and early scientific warnings at the beginning of that process that it might be destined to fail based on scientific evidence. While Australia supports the global Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations (CEPI) (founded in 2017) to stop future epidemics, a long-term government-supported initiative is needed for Australia’s own medical and vaccine R&D clinical trials. Currently, the chronically under-funded Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO) and several Australian universities are involved in new vaccine research projects (University of Sydney, University of Melbourne and University of New South Wales (for clinical trials research for Novavax vaccine). The Sydney Morning Herald reported on 4 February that Australian scientists and politicians are urging the federal authorities to specifically invest in mRNA vaccine manufacturing and R&D on the home soil. It remains to be seen whether the Australian Government chooses to diversify its vaccine choice base given the initial problems with distribution and inoculation problems caused by an under-trained medical professional in Queensland.

    Where to next?

    Looking at our alliance partnerships, Australia could certainly devise a more efficient way of selecting and directly funding projects of national significance to Australia as in the medical and vaccine research field—including through joint and/or pairing (equal) investments with our key allies. According to UNESCO’s global database of R&D spending as percentage of GDP, Australia spends around 2.2 per cent of its GDP on R&D ($23b), of which most goes to the business sector ($13b), then universities (circa $7b), government research ($2.6 billion) and private non-profit sector ($0.6b).  South Korea (4.3% or $79b) and Japan (3.4% or $169b) both spend significantly more, while the U.S. (2.7% or $476b) and Germany (2.9% or $109b) remain the world leaders in terms of total monetary value of R&D spending in the West, with China overtaking Germany (2% or $372b) and spending more than $25b on university R&D funding alone.  Australia may have been a victim of its own insufficient pre-pandemic planning and preparedness, despite the limited domestic transmission of COVID-19 largely due to a complete closure of international borders, as well as strict internal border controls—unseen in modern Australian history.

    In Australia’s current vaccine squabbles, states and territories are vying for ‘who deserves most and why’, with the Premier of New South Wales Gladys Berejiklian arguing her state should receive a third of all of Australia’s vaccines citing the highest burden with accommodating international arrivals and large population. That call brings to light a recent report about the deteriorating state of many regional hospitals. It is still unclear how these hospitals will benefit from additional government funding for a vaccine rollout across Australia which threatens to be a logistical quagmire.

    Jabs of choice

    While federal authorities have recently said that the biggest threat to Australia’s COVID-19 response is misinformation, the lack of a wider vaccine choice (as seen in Serbia’s example) may be also perceived as a threat to the nation’s health security that generates more questions than answers. Internationally acclaimed for its vaccination strategy, Serbia seems to be finding both local and international solutions in its COVID-19 battle, including investing in the local production of Russia’s Sputnik vaccine, which more Western countries are now open to buying. Meanwhile, Australia’s neighbours Indonesia and the Philippines have backed the Chinese-made vaccines, starting to inoculate their citizens (including the Indonesian President) with Sinovac—the second vaccine approved by Beijing for public use in China.

    Free-riding on the back of well-established alliance relationships is a lazy policy option. Waiting for the results of the COVAX facility’s successfully completed trials may also not be enough. The Federal Government must think hard about better strategies for furthering leading medical research (including clinical trials) without having a short-sighted focus on immediate returns to best position Australia in the geopolitical vaccine race. The best ‘armory’ is to be found in R&D preparedness and long-term planning and in not putting all eggs in one basket, no matter how promising the Golden Goose appears to be. Australia would be best served by developing, producing, manufacturing and exporting successful COVID-19 vaccines and products – including using AI and the latest mRNA technology. To date, it seems reluctant to do so.

    This article was posted on Thursday, March 18th, 2021 at 1:49am and is filed under Australia, COVID-19, Vaccines.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Refriended in Defeat: Australia Strikes a Deal with Facebook

    The Australian Treasurer, Josh Frydenberg, was unconvincing in his efforts to summon up courage.  The Australian government had been left reeling in the wake of Facebook’s decision to scrap and block Australians from sharing and posting news items on hosted pages. The company’s target of opprobrium: the News Media Bargaining Code.

    The Code’s ostensible purpose is to address the inequalities in the news market place by pushing digital giants and news outlets into reaching commercial deals.  Failing to do so will lead to final offer arbitration between the parties, where the independent arbitrator selects one of the deals on offer.  That selection would be binding on both parties.

    Facebook was having none of it, with its managing director for Facebook Australia and New Zealand William Easton stating that the scheme “fundamentally misunderstands the relationship between our platform and publishers who use it to share news content.”  Left with “a stark choice” – to either comply with the law drafted in ignorance of such realities, “or stop allowing news content on our services in Australia”, Facebook preferred the latter option.  The main objective, then, was for Facebook to press the Australian government to abandon the code altogether or, what was more likely, soften the terms of its application.

    On February 23, after a five day digital siege which saw outrage from numerous community, charity, media and political organisations across the country, Frydenberg announced that Facebook had “re-friended” Australia.  He was resolute on the point that the amendments did not take away from the Code’s central features: it remained mandatory, was “world leading” and “based on a two way value exchange.” It retained a final offer arbitration mechanism.  The Treasurer also thanked Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg for “the constructive nature of the discussions” and asserted that the object of this whole exercise was “to sustain public interest journalism in this country.”  For a government that has encouraged the prosecution of whistleblowers and threatened the prosecution of journalists for engaging in that very journalism, dark ironies continue to bubble.

    Facebook would have been softly chuckling at the amendments or “clarifications”, as Frydenberg preferred to call them.  The joint press release from the Treasurer and Paul Fletcher, the Minister for Communications, outlines what can only be regarded as capitulations.  Whether the digital platform in question will be designated by the Treasurer as one needing to cough up the appropriate remuneration will depend on whether it “has made a significant contribution to the sustainability of the Australian news industry through reaching commercial agreements with news media businesses”.  At this writing, Facebook is doing that very thing.

    The platform will receive notification by the government that it has been designated prior to any final decision, with a one month notice period.  Non-differentiation provisions will not be triggered where commercial agreements yielded “different remuneration amounts or commercial outcomes that arose in the course of actual business practices”.  The brutal market knows best.

    Finally, resort to final offer arbitration will only take place as a matter of “last resort where commercial deals cannot be reached by requiring mediation, in good faith” after a period of two months.

    Whether expressed in a fit of delusion or disingenuousness, the ministers also make the unsubstantiated claim that the amendments would “strengthen the hand of regional and small publishers in obtaining appropriate remuneration for the use of their content by the digital platforms.”

    Sue Greenwood of York St. John University based in the UK argues that the opposite outcome is more likely, with the proposed law leaving “smaller or local news providers in a weaker position”, disadvantaged relative to those who “deliver content which gets more clicks and shares on Facebook”, thereby improving their negotiating position.

    While the predatory practices of Big Tech are to be lamented and loathed, this Code is a sprawl of potential failings.  It has puzzled and alarmed the inventor of the World Wide Web, Tim Berners-Lee for “breaching a fundamental principle of the web by requiring payment for linking between certain content online.”  Gratis linking, “meaning without limitations regarding the content of the linked site and without monetary fees – is fundamental to how the web operates.”

    It has induced much head scratching on the part of economists, not least because the Code seems to encourage failing industries and potentially benefit other media giants, such as Rupert Murdoch’s unsavoury News Corp.  This is the unrepentant view of former Australian Prime Minister, Kevin Rudd.  “The problem with the government’s current response to the challenges of the digital media marketing code is that it seeks to solve one problem … by enhancing the power of the existing monopoly – that’s Murdoch.”

    The Code has also caused consternation to digital activists for not addressing privacy concerns.  It does nothing to counter the concentration of information and relentless data extraction known as surveillance capitalism, defined by Shoshana Zuboff “as the unilateral claiming of private human experience as free raw material for translation into behavioural data.”  That data is sold, in turn, to corporate players to target human behaviour in a predictive way.

    The other digital giant no doubt doing a jig in light of these announcements will be Google, who, despite bullying threats to withdraw its search engine from the antipodes, preferred frenetic negotiations.  To date, the company is boasting of striking deals with dozens of Australian media outlets as part of its News Showcase.  It can already make a good argument for not being “designated” for contributing to the sustainability of the Australian news industry.

    A victory, then, for the digital giants.  A tail-between-the-legs capitulation from Canberra, and a single, dagger directed blow at the barely breathing body of Australian democracy.  And just to add appropriately salted insult to wounding injury, Facebook promises that it may well do it again.  The digital brutes have been emboldened.

    This article was posted on Tuesday, February 23rd, 2021 at 11:22pm and is filed under Australia, Facebook.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Morons, Vaccines and Tennis: Booing at the Australian Open

    It was a fittingly poor conclusion to a tournament that risked being cancelled, run to ground, or even rendered stillborn.  The tennis world number one, Novak Djokovic, had captured his eighteenth grand slam against would be usurper Daniil Medvedev, whose winning streak of twenty matches was conclusively blotted.  The victory was achieved before a crowd filled with vocal Serbian supporters, flags fluttering, a number sporting the šubara, a rather odd thing to wear given the warm temperature (symbolism will resist climate) and the šajkača cap with insignia associated with the Chetnik irregulars who fought in the Second World War under the monarchist banner.

    With sport, history, and battle motifs entangled, supporters awaited, impatiently, for their hero to take the cup.  The necessary formalities had to be settled.  Tennis Australia president Jayne Hrdlicka gave an unremarkable speech, and felt it necessary to mention the difficulties that had come with staging the tournament.  “It’s been a time of heartfelt challenge.  It’s been a time of deep loss and extraordinary sacrifice for everyone.”  But there was some reason to cheer. “With vaccinations on the way, rolling out in many countries around the world, it’s now a time for optimism and hope for the future.”

    Boos, hissing and jeering followed.  These were also repeated when thanks was offered to the Victorian government.  Having endured a 112-day hard lockdown with strict limits on movement last year, and a snap five day lockdown that also ate into the tournament schedule, many of the spectators were weary and disgruntled.  Hrdlicka was diplomatic.  “You are a very opinionated group of people.”

    Novak’s own reaction was one of ginger caution, tiptoeing through a potential minefield.  The AO, he concluded in his speech, was a tournament of various feelings coloured by the quarantine experience of players, their training facilities (or lack of), and the mental adjustments of playing to empty stands.  “There are a lot of mixed feelings about what happened in the last month or so, with tennis players coming to Australia.”

    He had to concede, despite initial reservations, that the report card of the organisers merited a high grade.  “But I think when we draw the line in the end it was a successful tournament for organisers … it wasn’t easy, it was very challenging on many different levels, but they should be proud.”

    As a cipher of sentiment among tennis players, and a nationalist symbol for his country, Djokovic’s words and actions receive extra magnification.  Good intentions can be misconstrued; heartfelt notions are mocked for their cock-eyed naiveté.  Supporters await cues on what sort of conduct to emulate: What changes to his diet will be made, and which foods will he endorse or condemn?  His politics is scrutinised, his world view deconstructed and interpreted.

    With 72 players being placed in hard quarantine on arriving in Australia prior to the tournament, Djokovic was derided for listing six demands made by players to make conditions less stringent.  These included reduced periods of isolation, improved food and the movement of players to private housing with appropriate tennis courts.  “Djokovic,” tweeted the reliably temperamental Nick Kyrgios, ranked 47 in the world, “is a tool.”  The brats had spoken, and the Serbian player took the fall.

    The case with vaccines was particularly salient.  Djokovic’s reported opposition to vaccinations has become something of a millstone.  In a nightmarish year which saw his efforts to keep the pulse of tennis going during a pandemic with the Adria tour in the Balkans, Djokovic became a figure to be admired and reviled in the coronavirus wars.  The tennis event held in Serbia and Croatia in June saw Djokovic, other players and staff, contract COVID-19.  Social distancing measures were ignored.  As a consequence, the tournament was abandoned.  As he explained in the aftermath of the disaster, the tournament had been organised “with the right intentions.”  There were “steps that could have been done differently, but am I going to be then forever blamed for doing a mistake?”

    As for vaccines, Djokovic attempted to shuffle his position for the New York Times in August last year.  His opposition to jabs had been “taken out of context a little bit”.  The issue he had was with “someone forcing me to put something in my body.  That I don’t want.  For me that’s unacceptable.” Djokovic professed to not being “against vaccination of any kind, because who am I to speak about vaccines when there are people that have been in the field of medicine and saving lives around the world?”

    The reaction from the tennis punditry and press corps to the irate spectators proved savage. Stuart Fraser of The Times was impressed by the successful conclusion of the Australian Open.  “But between players giving tournament director Craig Tiley ‘significant abuse’ and spectators booing the mention of vaccines at the trophy ceremony, it really has brought out some morons.”  George Bellshaw of Metro called it “bonkers” while Ben Rothenberg of the New York Times kept his reaction raw: “It was a weird-ass five weeks in Australia, tennis.”

    The Daily Mail Australia thought it could offer a deeper insight.  “Rowdy Australian fans were not booing the coronavirus vaccine rollout, but were instead protesting Melbourne’s three lockdowns.”  The Mail can never be accused of being anthropologically sharp and did not disappoint with its observation that the “boos” were “few” and “were eventually drowned out by cheers and applause.”  Federal Senator Matt Canavan thought it traditional that Australians at sporting tournaments “boo politicians”.  It only took a few for others to “join in and that is mob behaviour”.  Those in the crowd were “just having a bit of fun.”  So much for the profound analysis.

    At stake here is a more complex picture for Australian authorities at both the state and federal level.  Ill-tempered views and suspicions about vaccination exist, though these are impossible to measure with certainty.  Within the patchwork multi-ethnic country, sceptics and rumours circulate, questioning government intentions and competence.  Protests against the impending vaccine rollout have taken place.  A greater challenge than hosting a successful international tennis tournament awaits.

    This article was posted on Monday, February 22nd, 2021 at 6:39pm and is filed under Australia, Lockdown, Sports, Vaccines.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Murdoch’s Australia Censors Google, Facebook, Science and Freedom of Speech

    The mendacious Australian Mainstream media, Coalition Government and Labor Opposition demand via a news media Bargaining Code that Google and Facebook pay Murdoch and Nine media huge sums for quoting Links to their “information” for free.

    Google seems to have surrendered to this Australian blackmail and negotiated a private deal to avoid damaging its core Internet operation of quoting Links to information for free.

    Facebook has finally responded to this Australian blackmail by saying that it will not pay, and as a law-abiding organization will accordingly not quote Links to Australian media “information”.

    Murdoch-dominated Australian Media and MPs are censoring Google and Facebook in a qualified fashion – they can escape this Government-imposed censorship if they pay huge sums to powerful Australian media chosen by the Government.

    If US citizen Murdoch’s Australia can censor 2 of the biggest media organizations in the world, what hope is there for the little guy or indeed for democracy in Kleptocracy, Plutocracy, Murdochracy, Corporatocracy, Lobbyocracy and Dollarocracy Australia? In Murdochracy and Corporatocracy Australia Big Money purchases people, politicians, parties, policies, public perception of reality, votes, more political power and more private profit.

    As a scientist and scholar, for 55 years I have been routinely and extensively quoting “links to information” (references to books and scientific papers) in scientific papers (over 100), chapters in 20 books, science-informed humanitarian articles (hundreds), and in 7 huge, science-informed, information-rich books. Indeed this process of documentation is fundamental to reporting scientific or scholarly findings.

    Thus a typical scientific paper (hard copy or electronic) has successive Abstract, Introduction, Methods, Results, and Discussion sections, with a final Reference section systematically detailing supporting scholarly references (“links to information”).

    Where will this compulsory Australian monetization of “links to information” and attack on free expression go? Presently it is confined to Murdoch’s Australia blackmailing Google and Facebook into paying huge sums to the dangerously mendacious Murdoch and Nine media that heavily determine the outcomes of Australian elections in an ongoing travesty of democracy.

    However the logical extension of this news media Bargaining Code in free market, neoliberal Australia is for Government to eventually demand similar draconian payments from all scientists, scholars, writers, journalists, publishers (on-line or hard copy), bookshops, library catalogues, and libraries.

    This is a massive threat to freedom of expression in Australia and the world. Even before the Enlightenment scholars were freely quoting Plato, Aristotle, Eratosthenes, Euclid and Pythagoras.

    And to make it worse, the variously Stupid, Ignorant and Egregiously Greedy (SIEG as in Sieg Heil) fascoids proposing this government-imposed censorship through compulsory and massive monetization of “links to information” are arguing for further censorship of already significantly censored Google, Facebook and other media.

    These disgracefully mendacious purveyors of “fake news through lying by omission” are now disingenuously claiming that a Facebook that has withdrawn from reporting Australian media will be increasing the relative incidence of “fake news” on Facebook at the expense of “truthful Australian Mainstream media reportage”. What utter self-serving rubbish. Lying by omission is far, far worse than repugnant lying by commission because the latter at least permits public refutation and public debate. Australia’s Murdoch-dominated Mainstream journalist, editor, politician, academic and commentariat presstitutes have an appalling and entrenched culture of “fake news through lying by omission”.

    Indeed, to the best of my knowledge, the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC), that is helping the Australian Government censor Google and Facebook, has not taken any action against oligopoly Australian Mainstream media for egregiously deceiving its paying customers via entrenched, massive and anti-democratic “fake news through lying by omission”.

    There is an extremely serious existential dimension to this travesty. The world is existentially threatened by (a) man-made climate change (unless requisite action is taken, 10 billion people will die en route to a sustainable human population in 2100 of merely 1 billion; see my recent huge book Climate Crisis, Climate Genocide & Solutions (846 pages, Korsgaard Publishing, Germany), and (b) nuclear weapons (a post-nuclear holocaust nuclear winter will wipe out most of Humanity and the Biosphere). Indeed one of humanity’s greatest minds, Stephen Hawking has stated “We see great peril if governments and societies do not take action now to render nuclear weapons obsolete and to prevent further climate change” (Stephen Hawking, Brief Answers to the Big Questions, John Murray, 2018, Chapter 7).

    Yet the effective climate change denialist and pro-nuclear terrorism SIEG fascoids and mendacious Murdoch media proposing this massive imposition on human inquiry have already (a) put Australia among world leaders in 16 areas of climate criminality, and (b) as craven US lackeys strenuously and criminally oppose the UN Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW) that came into effect in International Law on 22 January 2021 (it prohibits State parties from possessing nuclear weapons or supporting such possession “in any way”).

    I am a forthright, much-published, half-century career scientist and humanitarian writer, and have been trying for decades to inform my fellow countrymen of these horrendous realities. However in the last dozen years I have been rendered “invisible” in the land of my birth and sole allegiance, Australia, by mendacious Mainstream gate-keepers acting for malignant, racist and anti-science foreign interests. I won’t give up, and am very encouraged that half a million of my fellow Australians signed the petition launched by former PM Kevin Rudd for a Royal Commission into Murdoch media in Australia.

    Science-informed Australians will utterly reject Murdoch media and the dangerously anti-science Coalition, vote 1 Green and put the Coalition last. Please inform everyone you can.

    This article was posted on Sunday, February 21st, 2021 at 9:40am and is filed under Australia, Censorship, Corporate Globalization, Freedom of Expression/Speech, Social media.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Facebook Unfriends Australia: The Triumph of Epistemic Chaos

    Creepy and ruthless Facebook has again impressed with its steely indifference to civic responsibility, as if a company established by a sociopath could ever be a model of human improvement. On February 18, Mark Zuckerberg’s antisocial company took aim at Australia by blocking those in that country from sharing local and international content.  As the company notice to those trying to share material went: “In response to Australian government legislation, Facebook generally restricts the posting of news links and all post from news Pages in Australia. Globally, the posting and sharing of news links from Australian publications is restricted.”

    As with previous thugs of mercenary trade (the Dutch East India Company and its British equivalent come to mind), Facebook is keen to make the rules it likes, and ignore those of the commonweal.  It is a plundering pioneer in the world of surveillance capitalism, which has led to what Shoshana Zuboff calls an “epistemic coup” with “unprecedented computational concentrations of knowledge and power” gathered by extracting data elitists.  These elitists, in turn, trash such concepts as the rule of law and democracy in the name of profits.

    As she explained in her keynote speech at last year’s EU Parliament’s Science and Technology Options Assessment panel, “These corporations are not publishers, they are not distributors, they are not merely adtech providers; they are indiscriminate, radically indifferent all-you-can-eat extractors of everything forever, all for the sake of prediction that become more lucrative as they approach certainty.”

    Australia’s News Media Bargaining Code is one such proposed imposition on these extractive qualities, though it does little to actually redress the central principles Facebook and Google operate under.  The Code, as it stands, is a compendium of defects sold as politics rather than sound structural change. In it, the Australian government hopes not to restrict surveillance capitalism so much as redirect it.

    According to the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission the Code would “address the fundamental bargaining power imbalance between Australian news media businesses and major digital platforms.”  It’s all a problem of revenue: the fourth estate is dying, having lost its classified advertising base; the Australian government, unenthused by ideas of creating funding schemes or taxing Big Tech, has come to the conclusion that these giants will subsidize and ultimately regenerate old media outlets.  To do so, it proposes making companies reach, through good will negotiations, bargains by which revenue can be distributed.

    While making wild presumptions of what platforms such as Facebook do with the news (referrals, shares and so forth), the government will also require these Silicon Valley hulks to notify media organisations of any change in their search algorithms and abide by an arbitration mechanism.  Disputes on the amount of revenue will then go to an arbitration body.  Such scenes promise to be messy: media moguls hunkering down to discussions with such amoral practitioners as Facebook.

    The blocking of news content on the Facebook platform precipitated a range of consequences, some of them possibly surprising to Zuckerberg and his crew.  The Facebook pages of news organisations were immediately emptied of content.  Australia’s ABC put it like this: “If you search for the Facebook pages of (for example) ABC News, the Sydney Morning Herald, the New York Times, and the BBC, you’ll see a blank feed saying ‘No posts yet.’”

    This was not all.  The draft Code has a definition of news content of some breadth, which purports to be any material that “reports, investigates, or explains issues that are relevant in engaging Australians in public debate”.  When approached for comment on the issue, Facebook confirmed it has pushed its own reading to the limits, citing a lack of clarity.  “As the law does not provide clear guidance on the definition of news content, we have taken a broad definition in order to respect the law as drafted.”  Not that the law has been implemented, but Facebook has been quick on the draw.  Snottily, the company promises to “reverse any Pages that are inadvertently impacted.”

    Government pages were also caught up in the dramatic scrub, including the Australian Bureau of Meteorology, Queensland Health and an assortment of commercial and retail outlets.  The blocking of content on the bureau’s site was considered particularly galling, given cases of flooding in Queensland and fire danger in Western Australia.  “Warnings need to get to as wide an audience as possible as a matter of safety,” tweeted ABC weather presenter Nate Byrne.  “Shocking.”

    Smaller community news outlets, trade unions, homeless charities, and various local controlled health services were also enveloped in the information clean. Indigenous communities have been particularly bruised. According to the National Indigenous Times, “Indigenous health and media groups fear Facebook’s pushback will have a dangerous impact on regional and remote communities during [the] wet season and the COVID-19 epidemic, with concerns communities will not have access to vital updates on flood warnings or the rollout of COVID-19 vaccinations.”

    The National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Legal Services saw the issue of blocking content on its site as a matter of rights, restricting an invaluable means of connecting with the community.  “This is a human rights issue, silencing the voices of Aboriginal & Torres Strait Islander people, our representative peak bodies.”

    In going for the Australian throat, Facebook has resorted to a different approach from that other giant of amoral propensities, Google.  Google has repeatedly threatened to withdraw its search engine from Australia for similar grievances against the draft Code. But the company has been aggressively negotiating and buttering up Australian media outlets for its News Showcase.  The Australian government sees this as a triumph, a strange interpretation given the positively pyrrhic nature of any such outcomes.  Google can well argue to have come out better in the deal, its business model left intact.

    The time has come to reconsider the very operating rationale of such companies in an effort to address their singular monopoly position.  Solutions are not merely to be found in government regulation and antitrust approaches.  The very allegiance shown to such platforms by their captive users will have to change.  The time has come to save the human project from surveillance capitalism.

    This article was posted on Saturday, February 20th, 2021 at 5:54pm and is filed under Australia, Censorship, Facebook, Google, Media.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • A Classic Example of Biased Political Reporting

    The Sydney Morning Herald has always been regarded as a reasonably responsible newspaper. Although editorially it was generally a supporter of the misnamed Liberal Party, its opinion pieces generally try to pursue an open mind. Its editorial commentary of course generally favoured one side of the political divide rather than the other. The writers were generally frank about their perspective, favouring one side or the other. Many of their writers strove for a fundamentally neutral stance, overtly favouring neither one side of politics nor the other.

    One could always agree or disagree with a writer’s perspective. As the old adage had it, your interpretation is your own, the facts however are sacred. Thus, it was possible to read a column by a writer from a different political perspective, but except the thrust of their argument because the facts that were presenting led one to a particular conclusion.

    The Sydney Morning Herald has, however, moved away from the position of the facts being sacred, leaving their interpretation to be a matter of preference. The specific example which brought this vividly to mind was the recent article by the Herald international editor, Peter Hartcher.

    The article was entitled “Global threat from three strongmen” and appeared 19 January 2021. Most of the article is devoted to an unqualified attack upon Russia, and in particular its president Vladimir Putin. It commences by asserting that Putin is displaying “a new brazenness.” It was always obvious, Hartcher baldly states without a shred of evidence to support it, that Putin was “directing the assassinations and disappearances of his opponents.”

    Killing his opponents with radioactive isotopes and nerve agents were methods, Hartcher claims which “might go undetected in most circumstances”. Really? Where is the evidence for this extraordinary (and false) claim? The evidence does not exist because it is simply not true, either as to its alleged non-detectability, and to the perpetrator of such acts.

    Next comes a vague reference to the Soviet era Novichok which, we are solemnly assured, “can’t be bought at your local chemist or even on the dark web.” What is this vague allegation actually evidence of? When was Novichok used outside the fantastic and vague allegations surrounding former Russian spy Sergei Skripal who with his daughter is currently illegally held incommunicado by the British?

    Is Hartcher unaware that Novichok is a drug held by a number of western countries, and that if used will assuredly kill its victim within minutes? Hartcher then goes on to cite whom he calls the “hero of Russia’s opposition movement, the charismatic Alexei Navalny” who took ill on a flight from Tomsk to Moscow in August last year. Navalny may be a “hero” in Hartcher’s eyes. He is significantly less in the eyes of the Russian public, or whom 2% voted for him when he stood for office.

    Hartcher is not content with Navalny taking ill on his flight to Moscow. He had to have been the victim of a “suspicious poisoning”. That the plane was diverted so that Navalny could be rushed to hospital where the examining doctors found no evidence of “Novichok” or any other illicit substance is not mentioned.

    Neither does Hartcher mention the fact that the doctors voluntarily allowed Navalny to be flown to Berlin. He was not “wrested” from the hospital. It is absurd to suggest that the plane would have been allowed into Russian airspace and those on board allowed to “wrest” him from the hospital and be flown to Berlin. The idea is so fantastic it is difficult to believe that a senior writer could advance it is a serious idea.

    We are then treated to an alleged telephone call that Navalny is said to have made from Berlin, to an unsuspecting Federal Security Bureau officer who, according to Navalny, blurts out a fantastic story about a bungled assassination attempt, thereby exposing Putin’s “fearsome security apparatus as ineffective and worse, ridiculous.”

    This is the same security service that originally failed to kill Navalny, failed to finish the job whilst he was in hospital, and allowed him to be whisked away to expose to the world their incompetence. Are we seriously expected to believe this unadulterated rubbish?

    Hartcher then claims that Putin was “so afraid of Navalny, he barred him from standing for election in 2018.” Actually, Putin did no such thing. Navalny was barred from standing for election because of a criminal conviction, for which he received a suspended sentence. He breached the conditions of his release by staying in Germany, despite receiving a warning from the authorities that he was in breach of his sentence conditions. Hartcher fails to mention these inconvenient facts.

    Navalny voluntarily returned to Russia, despite having the certain knowledge he would be arrested. Moments before being arrested, Navalny utters the words we are told; “Putin fears me most. I am not afraid.”

    Hartcher goes on in the article to turn his attention to another “authoritarian leader to drop the pretence of any sort of restraint” when he writes a short piece on Chinese president Xi Jinping. But by now one knows what to expect from the mangled worldview of the international editor so I will leave the interested reader to read Hartcher’ blessedly short mangling of Chinese history. If they have the stomach for the continued distortion of history represented in this alleged journalist’s writing.

    This article was posted on Sunday, January 24th, 2021 at 8:20am and is filed under Australia, Disinformation, Media.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Immortal Wins: India Defeats Fortress Australia

    It was never meant to be like this.  After the Indian cricketing team met misery and disaster in the first test match at Adelaide, registering a paltry 36 in its second innings, little hope was had for the touring side.  Australia threatened rout and massacre.  The Border-Gavaskar trophy seemed within the home side’s grasp.

    And the home side had every reason to feel insufferably confident.   India’s talismanic wonder and leader, not to mention most threatening batsman, Virat Kohli, was heading home to be with his heavily pregnant wife.  But his absence was the first in what would become a series of seemingly denuding events.  One Indian player after another suffered injury.  What transpired was an astonishing display of courage, raw, convinced, and dedicated.  India’s cricket team realised that to triumph in Australia requires Spartan discipline and manic conviction.  They were not, as former Australian batsman Andrew Symonds declared about Indian cricketers in general, a lazy bunch.  Here was a breed of street fighting Indian cricketer determined to shock the hosts in their fortress.

    In the second test match in Melbourne, India retaliated with polish and control, dismissing Australia cheaply and winning by eight wickets in what head coach Ravi Shastri described as “one of the greatest comebacks in the history of the game.”  The replacement captain, Ajinkya Rahane, scored a defining century.  India won by eight wickets.  In the third test match in Sydney, India’s front line was stripped of its star performers through injury, surviving with a fifth day draw in a heroic rear guard action on an uneven pitch.  The Australian skipper, Tim Paine, proved injudicious, taunting Ravichandran Ashwin with a promise to “See you at the Gabba”.  The ill-tempered atmosphere seeped into the stands as well.  Jasprit Bumrah and the newly arrived Mohammed Siraj subsequently made complaints to match officials for racial abuse from the crowd.

    It was all set for the final test match in Brisbane at a ground dauntingly known through the cricket world as the Gabbatoir. Touring sides often go there to perish, and have been doing so for 33 years, when Australia last lost a test against the fabled West Indies.  There was nothing to suggest that India had a chance to win the match, though their performance at Sydney was grounds to think they might salvage a noble, bruising draw.  Their first string team had been ravaged by injury: first choice spinners Ashwin and Ravindra Jadeja and fast bowler Bumra, their favoured strike weapon.

    On both occasions when India came in to bat, the Australians sniffed weakness and potential collapse.  India countered by blunting the bowling attack, then gathering rewards.  On the fifth day, it took the delightful audacity of the young opening batsman Shubman Gill to put India on the way of a solid run chase, his method all wristy grace and fine timing.  But the odds were against getting the 328 runs required on a last day Gabba pitch famed for wearing.

    The Australian bowlers, however, could not consistently capitalise, though they proved, at times, brutal.  The imperturbable Cheteshwar Pujara was pummelled by an assortment of body blows by Pat Cummins and Josh Hazlewood, but remained frustratingly stoic.  The slow bowling art of Nathan Lyon, playing his 100th test match, failed to beguile and bamboozle.  The traditionally spearing deliveries of left-arm fast bowler Mitchell Starc refused to find their mark.  In contrast, India managed to bowl out Australia twice, with their salad green attack steadied by the freshly youthful Mohammed Siraj.

    Despite being generally untested, the figures of this Indian cricket side have been shot into the pantheon within a matter of a few games: gangly Washington Sundar; indomitable Shardul Thakur; the ferociously brave Rishabh Pant. Their names will be sung for years on India’s maidans and cricket tracks.

    Washington was remarkable and nothing like his namesake, in so far as George Washington had been a less than accomplished figure on the battlefield during the American War of Independence.  It was fortunate for the American colonists that Britain had, at her disposal, Charles Cornwallis, a figure even more incompetent and ill-fated.  Sundar, however, was all poise, unflappable before a bowling attack he incorrigibly teased.  He stroked delicately, drove deliciously.  Thakur was also more than a match: effective bowling and a stunning 123 run partnership with Sundar for the seventh wicket in the first innings in Brisbane.

    Pant, by way of contrast, wielded his bat like an axe, cutting through the bowling attack and splitting the field with forensic ruthlessness.   As always, he did so with almost suicidal disdain, managing to hit the winning runs in Brisbane with a scorching boundary.

    The cricket doctors will be out and about pondering why India did so well.  There will be speculation about global cricket’s centre of gravity shifting to the subcontinent, a fact that is finally translating into results on the ground.  Forbes weighed in, describing India as “cricket’s goliath” running “the sport through their governing body’s stranglehold.”  The crowning achievement of that stranglehold is the well-moneyed Indian Premier League, a competition that has attracted some of the planet’s finest cricketers.

    In the assessment of former Australian cricket captain Ian Chappell, such successes can be traced “a bit back to the IPL, where they’re playing against a lot of international players and a lot of good international players on a regular basis.”  For a captain most familiar with intimidating his opponents, Chappell was convinced that fear had ceased to bite the Indian team. “I think the intimidation factor that was there in the past isn’t there any longer.”

    By the end of the series, Kohli might have worried about resuming the captaincy, his crown restless.  Rahane, noble, stunning in leadership, devoid of histrionics and tenaciously calm of character; his young team, devoted, convinced.  Such a spoil of riches can only be an advantage to Indian cricket.  We can only hope that the administrators continue their wise streak and permit the youthful minnows to become masters.

    This article was posted on Friday, January 22nd, 2021 at 9:52pm and is filed under Australia, Cricket, India, Sports.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Sunk before Service: Australia’s Disastrous Submarine Project

    One only gets into the submarine procurement business to spite government treasurers and economic managers.  Efficiency and effectuality are bonus additions, but hardly necessary.  Witness the evolving disaster that is Australia’s SEA 1000 Future Submarine program, won by France’s DCNS, now Naval Group, in 2016.

    From the start, this seemed an audaciously peculiar choice. Australia had avoided purchasing more appropriate, medium-sized submarines from a conventional submarine maker, opting, instead, for a nuclear submarine design that would be retooled for conventional use.  For a country that is the third largest exporter of uranium, this was ironic as much as it suggested castration.

    Australia’s then Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull was all assurance about what would be a new class submarine, the Shortfin Barracuda.  “The competitive evaluation process (CEP) has provided the government with the detailed information required to select DCNS as the most suitable international partner to develop a regionally-superior future submarine to meet our unique national security requirements.”

    Defence Connect also noted such lofty expectations, with the Attack Class submarine “expected to deliver a quantum leap in the capability delivered to the Royal Australian Navy and its submarine service by leveraging technology and capabilities developed for nuclear submarines, implemented on a conventional submarine.”  Be wary of leaping submarines with leveraged technology.

    This pompous assertion of faux strategic value was initially to cost AU$50 billion.  But by May 2018, it became clear that the picture was somewhat dearer.  Rear Admiral Greg Sammut had to concede to Australian senators in an estimates hearing that another AU$50 billion would be required to sustain the submarines for the duration of their operating life.  In explaining this to Senator Rex Patrick, Sammut had obviously heeded lessons from the civil service school of obfuscation.  “Many of the detailed costs of acquisition and sustainment will be determined during the design process through choices made but at this point early estimation of the sustainment costs for the fleet are of the order of up to $50 billion on a constant price basis.”

    Combing through this dull, turgid answer, and the implications were ominous.  The expenditure for the submarine program would only rise, with the cost of sustaining the naval brutes being anywhere from two to three times that of their acquisition price.  “It’s disturbing that Defence has done this,” remarked Senator Patrick at the time.

    In any other context, this would be regarded as gross negligence, but defence costs operate in another realm of insensible practice.  And just to illustrate the point, over the course of five months in 2020, the submarine project cost Australian taxpayers a further AU$10 billion, occasioned by currency fluctuations and an oversight on the planned commencement date for the construction of HMAS Attack, intended as the fleet’s lead boat.

    The rising cost of the program has caught the attention of other politicians as well.  One Nation’s Senator Malcolm Roberts might be risibly dotty on such matters as climate science, but when it comes to defence expenditure, his feet are firmly planted.  In May 2020, he, in his own words, “took time to condemn the new contract signed to build 12 new submarines.”

    To his fellow senators, he asked whether the government had taken leave of its senses during times of COVID-19.  “In the middle of this pandemic we cannot afford to proceed with this contract.  This money will be far better spent to support the Australian recovery from the economic pit, that is caused by this pandemic.  By the time these submarines are delivered, they will be obsolete.”

    These are not the only problems associated with this profligately foolish exercise.  Questions have been asked about what has politely been termed “the amount of Australian industry content in the program” and the commitment of Naval Group to developing Australian industry.  Suspicions remain that this is, at heart, a French driven enterprise, with a duped Australia limping along with the cash.

    In January 2020, the Australian National Audit Office weighed in with a report outlining the risks in the SEA 1000 program, even at its incipient stages.  “The decision not to acquire a military-off-the-shelf submarine platform, and instead engage a ‘strategic partner’ to design and deliver the submarines with significant Australian industry input, has increased the risk of this acquisition.”  Delays were already taking place in the design phase; “contracted milestones” had been extended.  The ANAO also had a nugget of enlightenment: the government’s own Naval Shipbuilding Advisory Board, comprising US admirals previously receptive to the French proposal, suggested that Australia walk away from its contract with Naval Group.

    In February 2020, such concerns worried the Department of Defence and Naval Group sufficiently to warrant a firm rebuke to naysayers in a joint statement.  “Sovereign control over the Attack Class submarine fleet and maximising Australian industry involvement throughout all phases of the Attack Class Submarine program are contracted objectives in the strategic partnering agreement between Defence and Naval Group.”  Australian industry would also be “systematically” approached “to identify suitable suppliers of the vast array of equipment to be fitted to the submarine, ranging from hydraulic systems to galley equipment.”

    Minister for Defence Linda Reynolds was distinctly unimpressed with Naval Group Australia CEO John Davis, who had expressed his frank concerns about the project to journalists, generally approving of the findings of the ANAO report.  “I am disappointed by comments attributed to Naval Group Australia as they do not reflect the strong collaboration between Naval Group and Australian industry on this program of national significance.”

    The literature of expert doubt is also growing.  A report commissioned by Submarines for Australia, conducted by Insight Economics last year, was damning.  It noted how Naval Group was pushing back on incorporating “Australian content”; a “dangerous capability gap” given delays in the project; and the “questionable strategic value” of the entire effort.  Gary Johnston of Submarines for Australia was crushing in his critique: the Australian-French contract was based on “dumbing down a nuclear submarine by removing the whole basis of its superior capability, and then charging at least twice as much for a far less capable submarine.”

    The suggestion by Insight Economics, building on concerns from the Defence Department that some mitigation strategy might be in order, was revisiting the Collins class submarine – Australia’s current operating submarine platform – and modernising it.  “On the basis of expert professional advice, we consider that an evolved Collins 2.0 submarine, with a comparable ability to Attack, could be delivered at least five years earlier, at a much lower cost and with 70 per cent of local content.”  Dare they dream?

    The SEA 1000 effort is misfiring masculinity at worst, a striking example of Maginot Line thinking: we need this to make a statement, because other countries so happen to be playing in the same waters.  The tendency towards error and bungling, notably when it comes to acquiring and maintaining a submarine arm in defence, are consistent.  The Collins class submarine itself, intended as Australia’s “Holden amongst submarines,” should have furnished sufficient warning.  Instead, it laid the grounds for another colossal blunder, showing defence procurement to be a game for dunces.

    This article was posted on Thursday, January 21st, 2021 at 7:09pm and is filed under Australia, France.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Julian Assange, WikiLeaks and Australia’s Complicity

    Australia’s Foreign Minister, Marise Payne, said little in the statement from her department, which was a good thing, as it might have been dangerously useful.  The finding of a UK court on whether Julian Assange would be extradited to the United States was made “on the grounds of his mental health and consequent suicide risk.”  She does not care to mention the actual details of the case, the fact that the decision by District Judge Vanessa Baraitser, while blocking the extradition, was nastily focused against journalism.

    Payne insists on objective distance from the proceedings.  “Australia is not a party to the case and will continue to respect the ongoing legal process, including the U justice system’s consideration of applications for release, or any appeals.”  Superficial regard for due process is thereby preserved and acknowledged.

    What follows from the statement is a cover excusing the feeble efforts by Australian governments over the years of all stripes to assist Assange in his monumental battle against the US imperium and the proxy torments inflicted by Britain and Sweden.  “We have made 19 offers of consular assistance to Mr Assange since 2019 that have gone unanswered.  We will continue to offer consular support.”

    Such a statement sticks to the steady line that Australian officials have always been there, always ready and eager to assist a citizen beleaguered, persecuted and haunted by the agencies and instruments of an ally.  But the position is sacredly supine: do not rock the alliance with either the US or the UK; do not disturb the good offices of Washington or raise hackles in Downing Street.

    In the past, Australia, with a few dubious exceptions, has shown scant regard to shielding citizens in a monumental pickle, especially those accused of grave crimes of a political nature.  The Howard government’s lamentable response to David Hicks and Mamdouh Habib, both accused of terrorism offences by the US in the misnamed global war on terror, has been documented.  Hicks found himself facing that most dubious of legal experiments with cheery Australian approval: US military commissions established by the administration of George W. Bush.

    When the US Supreme Court struck down the legality of the commissions in Hamdan v Rumsfeld (2006) for violating the Uniform Code of Military Justice and the four Geneva Conventions signed in 1949, then Australian Foreign Minister Alexander Downer remained unmoved.  “Prior to that the military commission process had been upheld by other courts including the US court of appeals, so it had been, until it went to the Supreme Court, a process that was upheld by American civil courts.”

    Hardly the sharpest legal analysis ever offered, and one leaving Australian officials flatfooted in their treatment of an Australian citizen.  “Our advice has been, as had the American Government’s advice had been, that it was lawful,” explained a less than contrite Prime Minister John Howard.  “Now, the court has said no, well, we accept that – you get advice and you act on it.”

    The case with Assange is no less dire.  When President Barack Obama’s Vice President and soon to be US President Joe Biden was asked about the release of US State Department cables by WikiLeaks in 2010, the response was unequivocal: Assange was a species of “hi-tech terrorist”.  Republican Rep. Peter King of New York insisted that he be charged under the Espionage Act of 1917 (corks must have popped at the release of the Department of Justice indictment doing just that) and WikiLeaks designated a terrorist organisation. Obama’s Secretary of State Hillary Clinton merrily floated the idea of using a drone against Assange that same year, though claimed not to recall doing so in 2016.  “It would have been a joke, if it had been said, but I don’t recall that.”

    Rather than defend an Australian national against the positively homicidal and kidnapping disposition of US politicians and agencies, Canberra has been generally reticent, hiding behind the fiction of due process.  In some cases, Australian officials have gone so far as to level their own accusations against the Australian national, hinting that Assange might deserve trial and incarceration.  Former Prime Minister Julia Gillard stumbled into a trap of her own making in asserting in 2012 that it was an “illegal act” to leak documents to WikiLeaks.  “It would not happen, information would not be on WikiLeaks, if there had not been an illegal act undertaken.”

    Unfortunately for Gillard, she had not reckoned with the corrective assessment of opposition legal affairs spokesman George Brandis.  Gillard, he said reproachfully, had been “clumsy” in her use of language.  “As far as I can see he (Mr Assange) hasn’t broken any Australian law.”  Shadow Foreign Minister Julie Bishop similarly pointed out that Gillard was unable to identify “any Australian law that Mr Assange has broken.  Nor has she apologised for pre-judging him in that way and making that prejudicial statement.”

    In 2012, when he was Australian Foreign Minister, Bob Carr also waffled in accusation, casting a spear at Assange for releasing “secrets… for the sake of being released without inherent justification.”  In doing so, he threw in his lot with those who considered the release by WikiLeaks to be nothing like the Pentagon Papers, that jewel of exposure released by US Defence Department analyst Daniel Ellsberg.  The WikiLeaks exposures were “not like Daniel Ellsberg’s Pentagon Papers which revealed huge American deception, huge deception by the American government of the American public.”

    This was horrendously off the mark, not least given the assessment by Ellsberg himself since 2010 and at Assange’s extradition trial.  In December 2010, Ellsberg released a co-signed statement remarking that, “Every attack now made on WikiLeaks and Julian Assange was made against me and the release of the Pentagon Papers at the time.”  In giving his testimony as a defence witness for Assange in September 2020, he further argued that his “own actions in relation to the Pentagon Papers and the consequences of their publication have been acknowledged to have performed such a radical change of understanding.  I view the WikiLeaks publications of 2010 and 2011 to be of comparable importance.”

    Carr was also irritated by those nuisance accusations that Assange had not received sufficient consular assistance.  In his diary entry of June 2, 2012, he notes being, “Fed up with complaints from [Assange’s] family suggesting he hasn’t been supported by Australia and the opposition spokesperson saying the same thing”.  Disingenuous to a fault, Carr made the adventurous suggestion at a press conference that the WikiLeaks publisher “has had more consular support in a comparable time than any other Australian.  Strictly speaking, I don’t know whether this is the case.”

    Carr has since undergone the sort of transformation that the Czech dissident playwright Václav Havel found inherent in politics.  The very nature of the practice – one can hardly call it a discipline – produces a divorce between truth and the human being.  When it is convenient, these might meet, human might and solidarity marshalled behind verity.  Carr, for a time, found it inconvenient to consider the truth of Assange’s situation. Now, he has become Assange’s late-to-the party standard-bearer and defender.  His extradition to the US, argues the converted Carr, “would set an ugly precedent.”

    In the aftermath of the court decision, Carr suggested on Twitter that Australia was “entitled to tell Trump in his last days that Assange is one of us and his extradition is wrong.  He exposed US war crimes exactly like our own in Afghanistan which we are prosecuting.”  He also had words for Payne: raise the matter of Secretary of State Mike Pompeo in forceful and proud fashion to defend an Australian case. “Or does your view of the [US-Australian] alliance mean you never do that?”  Havel would have rolled his eyes.

    This article was posted on Wednesday, January 13th, 2021 at 9:36am and is filed under Australia, Julian Assange, WikiLeaks.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Australian War Crimes in Afghanistan: Decivilizing the Coalition Troops

    The Inspector-General of the Australian Defence Force Afghanistan Inquiry – released in late 2020 – serves as a barometer for the level of savagery imbibed by imperialist countries in their unending reign of terror against the Global South. The document is the outcome of a four-year investigation, initiated by the military in 2016 and headed by retired Major General Paul Brereton. Its scope was the period from 2005 to 2016.

    With the help of the report, 39 homicides have been confirmed in 23 separate incidents and 25 soldiers – some of whom are still serving in the Australian Defense Force (ADF) – have been implicated following the testimonies of 350 different witnesses. 36 matters involving 19 individuals have been referred to the federal police. The second squadron of the Special Air Services Regiment (SASR) will be disbanded, and some soldiers will be stripped of medals and awards received since 2006.

    Protocols of Barbarity

    The investigation details various protocols of barbarity followed by Australia’s Special Forces in Afghanistan. The initiation rites for junior soldiers tasked with “blooding” – the first kill initiated by means of shooting a prisoner – are mentioned.  “This would happen after the target compound had been secured, and local nationals had been secured as ‘persons under control’.”  “Throwdowns” – equipment such as radios or weapons – would then be placed upon the body.  A “cover story” would subsequently be scripted “for purposes of operational reporting to deflect scrutiny.” Incidents are also listed, during which soldiers “inflicted severe pain” on Afghan detainees, and “caused them injury,” indicating the use of torture.

    Dr. Samantha Crompvoets was commissioned by senior military command in 2015 to provide a “snapshot” of Special Forces operations and to probe allegations of war crimes. According to the Brereton report, Crompvoets “said that she was given the impression that there had been a ‘large number of illegal killings’ that had been ‘reverse engineered.’” Afghans would be killed, and then subsequently placed on the Joint Prioritized Effects List (JPEL) of targeted militants. The JPEL was a list of individuals who were to be killed or captured, on the basis that they were allegedly high-level Taliban or Al-Qaeda fighters and officials.

    In one instance, Crompvoets notes soldiers of the SASR driving along a road and sighting two 14-year-old boys. The soldiers quickly concluded they had come across Taliban sympathizers. The boys were stopped and seized. Their throats were slit. Their bodies were bagged and discarded in a river. Such occurrences were not infrequent; Special Force soldiers would commit such unsanctioned killings as a means to “get a name for themselves”. To take an example, in 2012, an elderly Afghan man, Haji Sadr, was beaten to death by an SAS soldier during a raid on his village, Sarkhoum.

    Apart from the inquiry, other sources have also revealed the absolutely abominable murderousness of Australian Special Forces in Afghanistan. An image published by the Guardian on December 1, 2020, showed an Australian Special Forces soldier drinking beer from the prosthetic leg of a dead Afghan. According to the Guardian, the photo was taken in the “Fat Lady’s Arms,” an unofficial bar set up by Australian special forces at their base in Tarin Kowt, the capital of Uruzgan province. In another picture, the device is strapped to a soldier’s backpack, and in a third, two soldiers pose with it. The prosthetic leg was reportedly taken from a “suspected Taliban fighter” after he had been killed during an April 2009 Special Air Service Regiment assault in Uruzgan.

    The Imperialist Narrative

    In a characteristically pliant manner, the corporate-liberal media has steadfastly clung to the ruling class’s imperialist outlook and normalized heinous war crimes as an anomaly in an otherwise honorable history of upright behavior by Australian troops in an illegal occupation of a Central Asian country. These outrages were all part of a larger war crime – the invasion and occupation of Afghanistan from 2001. The war has swamped the lives of ordinary Afghans with endless violence and insufferable misery. After almost 20 years of imperialist operations, the killings continue. A UN report recorded 3,458 civilian casualties in the first half of 2020, the majority of them caused by coalition troops.

    It is downright possible to claim, as the report does, that the Special Forces atrocities were simply the work of a “small number of patrol commanders, and their protégées” or a “warrior culture” that remained totally unknown above the level of corporals and sergeants. By the report’s own admission, this “culture” began domestically, in military training and indoctrination, not in Afghanistan. “It was in their parent units and sub-units that the cultures and attitudes that enabled misconduct were bred,” the report states. Jack Barry, a former rifleman in the ADF, says that during training exercises in his own country, “I was told by a Senior Non-Commissioned Officer, to not bother taking prisoners or treating enemy wounded and that we should just ‘slot them’ (a colloquial term for shooting them).”

    The Drift towards Savagery

    In Discourse on Colonialism, Aimé Césaire wrote:

    Colonization works to decivilize the colonizer, to brutalize him in the true sense of the word, to degrade him, to awaken him to buried instincts, to covetousness, violence, race hatred, and moral relativism…each time a head is cut off or an eye put out in Vietnam and in France they accept the fact, each time a little girl is raped and in France they accept the fact, each time a Madagascan is tortured and in France they accept the fact, civilization acquires another dead weight, a universal regression takes place, a gangrene sets in, a center of infection begins to spread; and that at the end of all these treaties that have been violated, all these lies that have been propagated, all these punitive expeditions that have been tolerated, all these prisoners who have been tied up and “interrogated”, all these patriots who have been tortured, at the end of all the racial pride that has been encouraged, all the boastfulness that has been displayed, a poison has been instilled into the veins of Europe and, slowly but surely, the continent proceeds toward savagery.

    The uncovering of Australian atrocities in Afghanistan is an indicator that the extent of brutalization and decivilization brought about by neo-colonial globalization and imperialism is alarmingly high. Practices as dehumanizing as “blooding” can be committed only by those whose ethical recesses have been flooded with necropolitical cravings for inflicting naked violence on the racialized bodies of locals – here considered as worthless than animals. Unless imperialist war-mongering does not stop, the moral economies of the Global North countries will soon implode – opening the floodgates of deep-seated bestiality and xenophobia.

    This article was posted on Tuesday, January 12th, 2021 at 7:58am and is filed under Afghanistan, Australia, Australia Defence Force (ADF), Barbarism, Crimes against Humanity, Imperialism, Media, War Crimes.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • A Changing World, But the West Remains Locked in a Time Warp

    Western politicians in general, and the American and Australian versions are not exempted, are fond of using phrases such as “the rules-based international order.” What they unfailingly really mean is the Western version of a rules-based order. The classic definition was set out in Wikipedia when it said:

    The rules based international order describes the notion that contemporary international relations are organised around principles of international cooperation through multilateral institutions, like WTO, open markets, security cooperation, promotion of liberal democracy and leadership by the United States and its allies.

    The key lies in the last part of that quote, “leadership by the United States and its allies.” For the United States any other concept was simply unthinkable. Not only was the United States self- represented as the personification of the “liberal rules-based order”, it fought almost continuous wars between 1945 and the present to ensure that the rest of the world understood and accepted that principle.

    It was never realistic. As Nick Bisley (AIIA 27/7/18) pointed out, the rules-based international order became a rhetorical centrepiece of Australian international policy. The problem for Australia (and the United States) is that the premises underlying the policy are being progressively more challenged as world power relentlessly shifts away from a United States centred approach.

    Bisley suggests that the apogee of the policy was, in fact, 2016 when the phrase was mentioned no less than 48 times in the Australian defence department White Paper of that year. The notion of an international rules-based order has a number of problems which the western media were remarkably reluctant to face.

    Perhaps the foremost problem lies in the assumption that the rules and the associated principles were built on the clear assumption of United States military supremacy. That was always a dubious proposition. It has become increasingly untenable as power in the world shifts.

    The Western powers had become accustomed to having their own way over the previous 200-300 years. Unfortunately for them, they never questioned the basis of that power, nor conceived that the sun would indeed set upon the Empire. This power was reflected in the United Nations Security Council’s permanent membership.

    Until the early 1970s that permanent membership consisted of three Western powers who had been victorious in World War II, plus the Soviet Union and China. The expulsion of the Nationalist regime from China in 1949 was not reflected in the Security Council, where they clung to power for a further 23 years.

    Nowadays the privileged status of France and the United Kingdom as permanent members of the Security Council looks increasingly anachronistic. 75 years after the war ended, Germany and Japan are still excluded from permanent membership. Some would argue that others, such as India and Brazil, should also be considered for permanent membership.

    The retention of the current permanent membership of the United Nations Security Council represents a world that no longer exists. A major part of the problem is that the Western powers are reluctant to acknowledge that the world has changed since 1945, and with those changes there has been a diminution of their political power.

    They may still think in terms of the rules-based international order, but are reluctant to ask some fundamental questions. For example, whose rules are we really talking about? How valid is a system of Western rules when the vast majority of the membership of the United Nations are neither “Western” nor particularly addicted to the West’s system of rules.

    Those nations see the rules-based order as simply a device designed to maintain Western power. Their disquiet or even rejection of this principle is enhanced when they observe the actual actions of those same Western powers. The United States is but one example, but it is a major one. As noted before, the United States has been almost continuously at war somewhere in the world since 1945. None of these wars could be described as in defence of a truly liberal rules-based order. One has only to look at the wars in Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria to make the point.

    Afghanistan was invaded based on a lie, and when the object of that lie, Osama bin Laden, was long dead, the invading troops failed to leave. There is currently speculation about whether the new United States president, Biden, will honour even Trump’s manifestly flawed commitment to leave.

    A different set of lies was used to justify the invasion of Iraq and again, 18 years later the Americans and their allies like Australia are still there. In Iraq’s case the Iraqi parliament passed a resolution in January 2020 that all foreign troops should leave the country. One year later they are still there.

    The invasion of Syria was a regime change operation. That has failed, but United States troops are still there. The felony is compounded by the systematic theft of Syrian oil. Israel continues to regularly bomb Syrian targets, a felony that compounds the theft of Syrian territory more than 50 years ago. The Australian government does them the courtesy of not mentioning the theft, and is regularly part of a tiny minority of votes for Israel in United Nations General Assembly resolutions. None of this is fit for publication in the Australian mainstream media.

    Looking at this long history of bad international behaviour it is little wonder that the bulk of the world’s nations look askance at notions of the “rules-based international order”. They see it for the hypocrisy that it manifestly is.

    It is a little surprising therefore that an ever growing number of nations look to China as the leader of a different order. China has a number of features that distinguish it from the western view. One of the most important is the principle of non-interference in the domestic affairs of other nations.

    This article was posted on Monday, January 4th, 2021 at 11:08am and is filed under Afghanistan, Australia, China, Iraq, Israel, Syria, The “West”, US Military, US War Crimes.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Irresponsible Happenings: Juukan Gorge, Rio Tinto and the “Never Again” Report

    “Never Again.”  These words are used with boring, stage managed frequency by political and company figures who should know better.  They title the interim report from the Joint Standing Committee on Northern Australia investigating the destruction of rock shelters at Juukan Gorge in Western Australia by Rio Tinto.  This act of spectacular cultural vandalism destroyed sites 46,000 years old.  The company initially thought it was worth the bill: AU$135 million worth of iron ore.

    The efforts of Rio Tinto were given that more punch as they took place on the eve of Reconciliation Week on May 24.  They were approved through existing mining laws long shaped by wily developers and land users.  The company had previously boasted of its rapport with the local indigenous peoples, including the Puutu Kunti Kurrama and Pinikura (PKKP).  But a bleak picture emerged.  PKKP concerns, according to the company’s statement, “did not arise through the engagements that have taken place over many years under the agreement that governs our operations in the country.”  (Rio was trimming the truth on that one.)  Flaws in the company’s decision-making structure were detected.  There was insufficient oversight.  The London-based head of corporate relations, Simone Niven, had little idea what the Juukan Gorge caves were before the blasting took place.

    In October, committee members were told that Rio Tinto had been all too keen to muzzle traditional owners in their efforts to save the rock shelters.  Amply lawyered, the company shot off letters warning that agitators could not speak publicly about their cause.  The PKKP were also told that an application for an emergency halt to the works to the federal government could only take place with Rio Tinto’s permission, and giving 30 days’ notice.  As Carol Meredith, chief executive of the PKKP Aboriginal Corporation recalls, “What we were reminded of by Rio’s lawyers was that we were not able to engage seeking out an emergency declaration that perhaps would have stopped proceedings, because of our claim-wide participation agreement.”

    Rio Tinto does not come out shining.  It was found to be strategic and calculating in approaching its mining, taking a “legalistic approach to heritage protection,” and adopting a self-interested approach in relying on “outdated laws and unfair agreements”.  “The evidence before the committee demonstrates severe deficiencies in the company’s heritage management practices, internal communication protocols and relationship practices with the PKKP.”  The company’s own board review had done little to address them.  The commercial incentive remained all-conquering.

    The report takes issue with the cobwebbed Aboriginal Heritage Act, a West Australian law from 1972.  The statute is meant to protect and preserve Aboriginal sites, a purpose it serves shabbily.  While section 17 of the current Act makes the destruction, damage or altering to an Aboriginal site a criminal offence, Section 18 provides a route of dispensation for the aspiring cultural vandal.  Breaches of the Act (in other words, damage to the site) will be excused provided the applicant seeks consent from the Aboriginal Cultural Material Committee (ACMC).  The ACMC, in turn, assesses the importance and cultural significance of the site, conveying the notice to the Minister with a written recommendation on how to proceed.  In making a decision, the Minister has full discretion.

    A draft bill, acknowledged by the committee, would remove Section 18 of the Act.  The report also recommends that new legislation involve traditional owners in the decision.  A commitment to stay all actions under Section 18 permissions obtained by Rio Tinto is sought till “they are properly reviewed to ensure that free, prior and informed consent has been obtained from Traditional Owners and is current”.  The new legislation should also prohibit agreements “which seek to restrict Traditional Owners from exercising their rights to seek protections under State and Commonwealth laws.”

    Gag clauses or restrictions in agreements as deployed by Rio Tinto to stifle protest are also recommended for removal.  Committee members also list a few other recommendations for the mining giant. These include negotiating a restitution package for the destruction of the rock shelters with the PKKP and full reconstruction and remediation of the site “at its own expense, with guidance and oversight from the PKKP, acknowledging Rio Tinto’s undertaken in this regard and the steps taken to date.”

    All mining companies currently operating in Western Australia, whether or not on Native Title land are also told to undertake independent reviews of existing agreements between them and the Traditional Owners, while also committing “to ongoing regular review to ensure consistency with best practice standards.”

    The predations of Rio Tinto opened up cataracts of condemnation.  Finding individual villainy would be tempting but inaccurate.  The company operates in an industry deaf, and increasingly deafened, to social policy.  A co-authored piece in The Conversation by academics specialising in social responsibility and mining (oxymoronic flair is rife in this field) claims that “community relations departments [in the industry] have seen sizeable reductions.”

    As with other entities driven by free market avarice, mining companies are also cool to the idea of greater protections for Aboriginal heritage sites, policed by federal regulations.  BHP, Rio Tinto, Roy Hill, Woodside and Fortescue Metals have told the inquiry that agreements with traditional owners have generally worked.  Juukan Gorge was merely an aberration.  Such giants remain taken with the fantasy that their arrangements arise from positions of equal bargaining power and adequate resources.  These agreements, according to Jamie Lowe of the National Native Title Council, “enable the pretence that when destruction is authorised, it is what traditional owners would have agreed had legislation given them the right to say no.”

    The Australian parliamentarians are inadvertently right.  This will never happen again, because the rock shelters have ceased to exist.  History and cultural traces, eradicated.  A spot in time, never to be repeated.  Harm caused by the mining industry to cultural heritage will simply continue in new forms, with consent manufactured.  Till the laws are changed and demand for natural resources slides, companies such as Rio Tinto will continue milking and reaping, whatever pull social responsibility has.

    This article was posted on Friday, December 11th, 2020 at 11:34am and is filed under Australia, Cultural Vandalism, Mining, Original Peoples.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • China’s Rise and Rise Proves a Winning Formula

    On the second of December this year the Chinese representative to the United Nations General Assembly addressed the meeting on the topic of Palestine and more particularly on his country’s view of the ongoing disasters that daily inflict the Palestinians in that country. Unsurprisingly, the speech received no coverage in the Australian media. The continued support by the Australian government for Israel in that Assembly, typically with the votes of the United States, Canada, Israel and some pocket handkerchief sized neo-colonies in the Pacific, is one of the great unreported matters of Australian “diplomacy”.

    The attitude of the Beijing government is to place the Palestinian cause “at the heart of the Middle East situation.” The Chinese vote in the United Nations in support of the Palestinian cause (along with the vast majority of member states) reflected the earlier statement on 1 December 2020 of Chinese president Xi Jinping. Speaking on that date in support of the International Day of Solidarity with the Palestinian people, Xi reiterated China’s firm support for the “just cause of the Palestinian people to restore their legitimate national rights.” Those are words one would not expect to hear from an Australian politician, and particularly its present Prime Minister who has uniquely managed to put Australia-China relations in their worst position since Australia recognised the PRC Government in 1972.

    Australia pays lip service to the notion of a two-state solution to the Palestine-Israeli issue, but effectively does nothing to promote it. Indeed, Australia has continued its unquestioning support for the Israeli position, as reflected in its United Nations General Assembly votes over many years, and in effect dismisses the Palestinians as a people without a legitimate argument. The refusal of the Australian mainstream media to even report the voting pattern of its government speaks volumes for the true stance of the politicians and the media.

    By contrast, the Chinese government insists that “the two-state solution is a bottom line of international justice.” The latest Chinese statement went even further, saying that there was “no going back on the tide of history.” The two-state solution, the Chinese statement added, was “the basis for solving the Palestinian question, and should be duly observed and implemented”.

    China’s position is unequivocal, as was also spelled-out in Xi’s message commemorating the International Day of Solidarity with the Palestinian people on first December in which he referred to the “legitimate national rights” of the Palestinian people. Xi commended the Palestinians for their efforts in endeavouring to create a peaceful settlement of the Palestinian issue.

    The Chinese United Nations statement went further. It referred to the two-state solution as being the “bottom line” of international justice. It went on to refer to the relevant United Nations resolutions as “important parameters” in the Middle East peace process and it called on an early solution to the problems associated with the border dispute, and went further in calling for further peace talks and to refrain from any action that might fuel the tensions.

    The Chinese statement is important for a number of reasons. It marks an ever-increasing Chinese role in the Middle East, sparked in part by the continuing expansion of its Belt and Road Initiative. That initiative is seen in marked contradiction to the blatantly lawless killing of Iranian scientist Mohsen Fakrizadeh, the most likely perpetrator being the Israelis, and certainly with the support of the United States. That killing was met with widespread condemnation throughout the region, including from countries such as Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Oman who are not normally aligned with Iran on any issues.

    The widespread condemnation of the Fakrizadeh murder also served to highlight the major difference between the Chinese and United States views of the Middle East. In the post-World War II period the United States has mounted multiple attacks upon countries in the greater region, from North Africa to many points south and east. None of those interventions have proven successful, and indeed they represent instead an increasingly clumsy level of intervention that has invariably turned those nations against the United States.

    Even the dubious vows of Donald Trump to vacate many countries in the region have to be taken with a grain of salt. The withdrawal of United States troops is not widely accepted within the US military establishment. Afghanistan is a classic example. Trump has vowed to end the United States military intervention there, but even if that were true, it does not mean the end of United States involvement. There are, in fact, more private military contractors in Afghanistan than regular United States troops. Their fate remains unmentioned. Similarly, with the highly lucrative CIA control of the poppy fields and its attendant heroin production. It is a major source of CIA clandestine funding and the total absence on the fate of the crop from US discussions is deeply suspicious.

    Again, in stark contrast to the Chinese mode of action, the United States is currently trying to create yet another military alliance, this time linking Japan, India and Australia with the United States. It is another blatantly anti-China exercise. It seems likely that only Australia will persist with this folly.  Japan is steadily increasing its economic links to China, and India, notwithstanding some border issues with China, is nonetheless a member of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation.

    Only Australia, as evidenced by its recent economically suicidal behaviour toward China, is likely to succumb to the Americans. There are no prizes for guessing how that will be interpreted in Beijing.  Australia seems increasingly destined to fulfil Lee Kuan Yew’s forecast of it becoming the “poor white trash” of Asia. Certainly, the present government, and the Labor opposition, shows no insight whatsoever into the perilous state they are placing the Australian economy by their mindless pursuit of American goodwill.

    As Tony Kevin pointed out in a recent article, “Australia sabotaged its own interests in China relations” (8 December 2020) there were early signs of a determination to cripple Australia – Chinese engagement, and they have now seemingly won. The consequences of this monumental stupidity are already apparent with over $100 million of Australian exports to China already lost.

    Meanwhile China, which until recently took almost 40% of Australia’s exports, is progressively extending its influence through an increasingly large number of countries, including formally staunch United States allies such as Saudi Arabia. The Chinese philosophy, despite western efforts to deprecate it, remains what Xi called win-win.

    It is clearly a winning policy. Countries like Australia, which are turning their backs on the Chinese, risk being left in the dustbins of history.

    This article was posted on Wednesday, December 9th, 2020 at 1:49pm and is filed under Australia, China, Israel/Palestine, President Xi Jinping, Trade, UN General Assembly, United States.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Freedom of Expression: Good for the Western Goose, Forbidden for the Muslim Gander

    When French president Emmanuel Macron was pilloried in some quarters for defending freedom of expression as a French value, Australian prime minister Scott Morrison backed his European counterpart: “We share values. We stand for the same things.” This professed French/Australian value for freedom of expression has now come back to bite the backside of the Australian prime minister.

    When it comes to publication of inflammatory western depictions of the prophet Mohammed that raise the ire of many Muslims worldwide, many western voices will step forth to defend freedom of expression. However, this fidelity to the freedom of expression will often change when what is being expressed casts the West in a negative light; a case in point being an image of an Australian soldier slitting a Muslim child’s throat.

    News.com.au featured a 60 Minutes Australia report about “disturbing allegations of the murder of children and a ‘killing as a sport’ culture” among Australian fighters deployed in Afghanistan.

    A sociologist, Samantha Crompvoets, spent months interviewing Special Forces soldiers about alleged war crimes in Afghanistan. Among the insouciant acts noted were soldiers tallying their kills on wall boards — kills that included civilians and prisoners.

    60 Minutes described the killers as a “rogue band” of special forces soldiers. One especially “disturbing allegation” described how Australian Special Forces soldiers mercilessly slit the throats of 14-year-old boys, bagged their bodies, and tossed them in a river.

    A Guardian exclusive exposed depravity with a photo of an Australian soldier drinking beer from a Taliban fighter’s prosthetic leg.

    The findings by Crompvoets and the 60 Minutes report were corroborated by the Australian government’s redacted Brereton Report of “possibly the most disgraceful episode in Australia’s military history”:

    … 39 unlawful killings by or involving ADF members. The Report also discloses separate allegations that ADF members cruelly treated persons under their control. None of these alleged crimes was committed during the heat of battle. The alleged victims were non-combatants or no longer combatants.

    What particularly stuck in the craw of political Australia was a tweet by a Chinese official, Zhao Lijian, of a gruesome throat-slitting image.

    Australian prime minister Morrison was apoplectic, calling the post “repugnant,” “deeply offensive to every Australian, every Australian who has served in that uniform,” “utterly outrageous,” and unjustifiable noting that it was a “false image.” Morrison demanded an apology from the Chinese government, the firing of Zhao Lijian, and for Twitter to remove the post.

    “It is utterly outrageous and cannot be justified on any basis whatsoever, the Chinese Government should be totally ashamed of this post,” Morrison said.

    First, calling the image false is deflection because anyone who gives more than a cursory glance to the image will right away realize that it is has been photo-shopped and does not purport in any way to be an untouched photograph.

    Second, the Australian prime minister obviously has backward moral priorities. I submit that what should be deeply offensive to Morrison and every human being being — not just Australians — and especially offensive for every Australian who has served in the Australian military are the egregious war crimes committed by those wearing the same uniform. The starting and focal point for condemnation must be the war crimes. Logically, if the spate of gruesome war crimes had not been committed by Australians in uniform, then outcry at the crimes would not have been filliped.

    Chinese foreign ministry spokeswoman Hua Chunying did address the outrage by Morrison in a TV address.

    “These cruel crimes have been condemned by the international community,” said Hua.

    “The Australian government should do some soul searching and bring the culprits to justice, and offer an official apology to the Afghan people and make the solemn pledge that they will never repeat such crimes. Earlier, they said the Chinese government should feel ashamed but it is Australian soldiers who committed such cruel crimes.”

    “Shouldn’t the Australian government feel ashamed? Shouldn’t they feel ashamed for their soldiers killing innocent Afghan civilians?”

    According to Afghanistan’s president Ashraf Ghani, Morrison did express — not a full-fledged apology — but “his deepest sorrow over the misconduct by some Australian troops.” Australia’s foreign minister Marise Payne also wrote to her Afghan counterpart to extend “apologies for the misconduct identified by the inquiry, by some Australian military personnel in Afghanistan.” The wording would seem to diminish the atrocities as “misconduct.” There is also a overarching emphasis that the crimes were committed by some troops, seeking to exculpate the bulk of the troops from bad apples among them.

    It would seem Australia is trying to distract from its horrendous war crimes. Colloquially put, Australia’s political honcho is trying to cover the military’s bare ass.

    World Socialist Web Site was scathing in denouncing the Australian Establishment’s response,

    The tweet by a mid-ranking Chinese official, condemning Australian war crimes in Afghanistan, has been met with hysterical denunciations by the entire political and media establishment. The response can only be described as a staggering exercise in hypocrisy, confected outrage and an attempt to whip-up a wartime nationalist frenzy.

    The illustration is based on an investigative report by the Australian Department of Defense, Hua pointed out, noting that “although it is a painting, it reflects the facts.”

    Hua pointed to Morrison’s real purpose: to divert attention and shift pressure from Australian war crimes to criticism of China.

    Australia Liberal MP Andrew Hastie preferred that the war crimes had been kept buried. Hastie (who as a captain in the Special Air Services was cleared of wrongdoing in an investigation into soldiers under his command who chopped the hands off dead Taliban fighters in Afghanistan) criticized the Australian Defence Force for releasing allegations of war crimes in Afghanistan, saying it has allowed China to malign Australian troops.

    Bipartisan support was forthcoming for Australian government indignation as Labor leader Anthony Albanese also criticized the image and shadow foreign affairs minister Penny Wong called it “gratuitous” and “inflammatory.”

    Prosecuting Western War Crimes

    At the end of World War II war crimes tribunals were set up. In Europe there was the Nuremberg Tribunal and in Asia the Tokyo War Crimes Tribunal. It was victor’s justice and no Allies were tried. This although the United States and, to a lesser degree France, engaged in a deliberate policy of starving German prisoners of war (who the US re-designated as disarmed enemy forces to evade the Geneva Conventions on POWs, as president George W Bush would later similarly do in Afghanistan when he refused to recognize POWs, labeling them instead as unlawful enemy combatants) and civilians. Germans stated that over 1,700,000 soldiers alive at the end of the war never returned home.

    In the Far East, there were no allies prosecuted at the Tokyo War Crimes Trial. It must be noted that just as Nazi scientists were brought back to work at the behest of the US, class A Japanese war criminals were also protected by the US from prosecution.

    Australia is not alone in the commission of war crimes. Canadian Airborne Regiment troops tied and blind-folded 16-year-old Shidane Arone, beat him with a metal bar, and burned with cigarellos for hours (he was later found to have burns on his penis), and took “trophy pics.” Arone was dead the following morning. The Canadian Airborne Regiment would be disbanded. US war crimes are numerous. They include My Lai in Viet Nam, Bagram in Afghanistan, Abu Ghraib in Iraq, etc.

    Western war criminals are seldom punished, or when punished, then not in a meaningful way proportionate to the crimes committed. In fact, if you expose the war crimes perpetrated by a western allied country, then you risk becoming targeted for imprisonment. Such is the situation that Julian Assange finds himself in today. Although an Australian citizen, Morrison has been unsympathetic to the WikiLeaks founder and publisher who exposed egregious US war crimes. Said Morrison, “Mr Assange will get the same support that any other Australian would … he’s not going to be given any special treatment.”

    This is what adherence to the tenet of freedom of expression genuinely signifies in much of the western world. In other words, freedom of expression is good for the western goose but bad when it is for the Muslim gander.

    *****
    For further background view the damning allegations of serious war crimes, including the execution of innocent civilians and detainees.

    This article was posted on Monday, December 7th, 2020 at 8:58pm and is filed under Afghanistan, Anti-war, Australia, China, Crimes against Humanity, Media, War Crimes.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Think Tankers Against China: The Australian Strategic Policy Institute

    Security think tanks are the leeches of industry.  Attached to their appropriate field, they compile analysis that is supposedly masterful, insightful and even useful.  Reports can recommend courses of action, from a troop surge in a failing war, to an increase of defence spending in bolstering cyber capabilities.  Bunkered in these institutes, the think tanker achieves eminence by detecting what moment in history to exploit, and how best to.

    In conducting this exercise, accuracy can become the logical casualty.  The security think tank often acts as an operational mercenary.  The funders want advice that confirms and affirms a position; the advising think tank wants continued funding.  Such a match is a poison for contrarian assessments.  The think tank thereby operates in circles more reminiscent of astrology, seeing patterns where there are none, and impressing their funders that a threat exists on a scale not previously thought possible.  This ensures more funding and future projects.

    The “China threat” presents one such moment.  Analysts are hardly going to be wreathed and garlanded with praise for suggesting that the PRC, while being a disagreeable neighbour and sporting a terrible human rights record, is not quite the external threat it is made out to be.  China is not Australia’s foe, despite efforts being made to paint it as such. Former Australian ambassador to Beijing Geoff Raby suggests a deep confusion in Canberra’s policy, unable to negotiate the line between “China as an enemy” and the sycophancy of “China tickle our tummies”.

    A primary think tank tasked with China threat inflation is the Australian Strategic Policy Institute.  Hugh White, formerly Deputy Secretary of the Department of Defence and ASPI’s inaugural director, wrote on the occasion of its 15th anniversary that its “primary purpose wasn’t to contribute to public debate about defence policy, but to provide an alternative source of policy ideas for government.”  But things changed.  The quality of defence policy fell; demand from government officials for genuinely independent advice “largely evaporated.”  ASPI joined the forum of public debate rather than staying in the field of “good policy making.”  White, for his part, became an establishment heretic, suggesting that the US share power with China in a “Concert of Asia” comprising Japan and India.

    Think tankers that boast about being independent and non-partisan are often neither.  But ASPI does so in a bellowing manner.  It insists on being “independent in the content of our research and in all editorial judgments and employs a rigorous internal and external peer review process.”  A more detailed picture of where the organisation receives funding would be helpful.  Current percentages of revenue come in at 35% from the Department of Defence and 32% from federal government agencies.  An interesting figure, and not much talked about, is that of 17% from “overseas government agencies”.  Defence industries contribute 3%, and the private sector 11%.

    Such figures are strikingly vague, and ASPI is unwilling to divulge further.  As Marcus Reubenstein notes in Michael West Media, “Its main funding was an annual grant from the Defence Department but over the past decade it has developed more and more revenue streams – and no obligation to reveal exactly who pays it what.”

    ASPI has been singled out as a notable agent of influence – and US influence at that – by one of Australia’s most seasoned political commentators and public servants John Menadue.  That influence is part of, according to Menadue, a seizure of Australian foreign policy (whatever is left of it) “by the defence, security and military clique led by the Department of Defence, the Australian Strategic Policy Institute which is financed by DoD and defence contractors, ASIO, Border Protection and the Office of National Assessments.”  That clique, in turn, is “heavily dependent on the US Departments of Defense, State, CIA and FBI for advice.”

    The corollary of such a seizure of power is the think tank’s hearty condemnation of Chinese villainy, often through the issuing of statements and reports filled with errors.  Executive Director Peter Jennings busies himself with warning of the Sino-monster.  The think tank’s director of defence, strategy and national security Michael Shoebridge opines that if “there’s reasonable grounds to believe the end user [of Australian research] will be Chinese military or Chinese security, the research partnership should not go ahead.”  ASPI experts warn of advances made in China in the field of weaponry, necessitating a more robust missile defence.  They also warn of democracies being “hacked” by China and that other bogeyman Russia, assiduously avoiding the United States as one of history’s keener political meddlers.  As Menadue observes, “ASPI’s pro-American and anti-Chinese views reflects the attitude of the ‘Australia/US defence intelligence complex’ (AUSDIC).”

    Australian politicians have also picked up the whiff of that complex steaming from ASPI.  In February 2020, Labor Senator Kim Carr publicised ASPI’s US State Department largesse of AU$448,000, splashed out by the Global Engagement Centre, to monitor Chinese research collaborations with Australian universities.   (ASPI claimed the amount was half that.)

    GEC’s special envoy is a former naval intelligence officer and Fox News correspondent, Lea Gabrielle.  The centre’s purpose, in its own words, is, “[t]o direct, lead, synchronize, integrate, and coordinate efforts of the Federal Government to recognize, understand, expose, and counter foreign state and non-state propaganda and disinformation efforts aimed at undermining or influencing the policies, security, or stability of the United States, its allies, and partner nations.”

    ASPI’s receipt of such funding commends it as an auxiliary of US interests, targeting Chinese involvement in the Australian university sector and elsewhere.  But the illusion of independence must be kept, and the US-sponsored study, called the China Defence Universities Tracker, removed any acknowledgement of the GEC in its online publication.  The PDF version, however, acknowledges, with gratitude, funding from the US State Department.  For all of this, ASPI claims that registering with the Foreign Influence and Transparency Scheme (FITS) somehow exonerates it, providing “visibility of the nature, level and extent of foreign influence on Australia’s government and political process.”

    Carr is less convinced.  “If it’s fair to scrutinise and to challenge the funding arrangements of researchers in Australian universities and science agencies, surely it’s fair to subject ASPI’s funding arrangements to the same level of scrutiny.”

    Assessments by ASPI have become the stuff of Australia’s parliamentary record, notably from the government side.  Material and projects are mentioned in parliamentary speeches.  In August this year, we saw Liberal Senator Sarah Henderson assail China’s Belt and Road Initiative with a perspective that would make any small-minded patriot proud.  The words of the institute are cited religiously: “The BRI is a strategic path to assert China’s growing power.”  The Victorian State government comes in for a beating, given its involvement with the BRI scheme.  Involving “Chinese companies in Victoria’s so-called AU$107 billion infrastructure big build” would take place “at the expense of Victorian jobs and the interests of Australian companies.”

    Senator Henderson’s crude reasoning of build and grab is accompanied by the fear, made clear by ASPI, that the Victorian government would be bringing in “a whole set of Chinese communications control and collection technologies, along with the so-called big build.”  This presented a “prima facie concern to our national interest and, potentially, to our national security interests.”

    This is not to say that the Victoria-BRI deal is not problematic.  It was made with China’s National Development and Reform Commission, the entity responsible for the “social credit” system central to a mass government surveillance program.  But it is also worth noting, as Bernard Keane does in Crikey, that the conservative Abbott government, in which Scott Morrison was immigration minister, also had its China deals.  The free trade agreement between Beijing and Canberra came with a loosening of strings for the agricultural sector.  Chinese workers on temporary contracts were brought in, compromising labour market protections for local workers.  The Murdoch press shouted down concerns from the unions with accusations that they were merely being xenophobic.

    With ASPI having the ear of Canberra’s political gallery, not to mention wallet, Sinophobia has become very fashionable indeed.  The Australia/US defence intelligence complex demands it and the moderates have been cast as appeasing heretics.

    This article was posted on Sunday, December 6th, 2020 at 10:22pm and is filed under Australia, China.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Imperfect Releases: Andrew Hastie, War Crimes Reports and Australia in Afghanistan

    If one were to get into the head of Australian government MP Andrew Hastie, a security tangle of woe would no doubt await.  Having been a captain with the Special Air Services and having also served in Afghanistan, he has been none too thrilled by the publicity soldiers he served with have received.  The report by New South Wales Court of Appeal Justice Paul Brereton has now been mandatory reading (or skimming) for political and military watchers.  Known rather dully as the Inspector-General of the Australian Defence Force Afghanistan Inquiry Report, it makes the claim that 39 alleged murders were inflicted on non-combatants by Australian special service units when operating in Afghanistan.

    Of interest is where the report goes from here.  A fair guess is that it will not venture too far into waters of reform.  Hastie, for one, would have preferred it never to have been published, or at least not released in the “imperfect” way it was.  He takes particular issue with the connected work of consultant Samantha Crompvoets, a sociologist commissioned by the Special Operations Commander of Australia (SOCAUST) to conduct a “cultural review” of the Special Operations Command in mid-2015.

    In many ways, the work of Crompvoets, which is drawn upon and referenced heavily by the Brereton Inquiry itself, is more significant.  It is less tightly hemmed by qualifications and speaks to the broader tactics and methods of Australia’s Special Forces.  In her January 2016 report, she refers to body count competitions and the use of the Joint Priority Effects List (JPEL).  Euphemised for battle, the JPEL effectively constituted a “sanctioned kill list” with numbers that were massaged.

    She notes methods of war common to counter-insurgency operations during the Cold War. From Algeria to Vietnam, those who often came off second best were villagers for the butchering.  Slaughtered villagers were often designated “squirters” when fleeing the arrival of Special Forces via helicopter.  Excuses were concocted for the generous bloodletting: the squirters “were running away from us to their weapons caches”.

    Clearance operations would also be used after the initial massacre.  The village would be cordoned off; the men and boys taken to guesthouses.  They would be bound up.  Torture would ensue for days.  These men and boys would then be found dead, shot in the head or have their throats slit.

    In one instance, Crompvoets notes soldiers of the SASR driving along a road and sighting two 14-year-old boys.  The soldiers quickly concluded they had come across Taliban sympathisers.  The boys were stopped and seized.  Their throats were slit.  Their bodies were bagged and discarded in a river.  Such occurrences were not infrequent; Special Force soldiers would commit such unsanctioned killings as a means of bonding, to “get a name for themselves”.

    The death of the two Afghan boys has now become the stuff of diplomatic provocation.  On November 30, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian tweeted a mocked up image of an Australian soldier ready to apply a blood soaked knife to the throat of an Afghan boy, holding a lamb. “Shocked by murder of Afghan civilians & prisoners by Australian soldiers.  We strongly condemn such acts & call for holding them accountable.”

    This was too much for Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison, who took issue with its repugnance.  But for Hastie, it went further.  Australia, he claimed in his speech to fellow parliamentarians on December 3, had let its guard slip.  His springboard was an opinion piece by Alan Jones, that most opinionated of broadcasters, less focused on the tweeted image than the prime minister’s reaction to it. “When will you,” bellowed Jones, “apologise for your language and that of your Generals that condemned all our men in Afghanistan, the best of the best, to the charge of criminal behaviour from a report you haven’t read and before any of them have access to the full weight of the law?’

    For Jones, innocence had been impugned by Australia’s political and military leaders.  China has simply furnished the Morrison government with suitable headlines of distraction, to “have them off the hook” even as Australia’s soldiers were being defamed.

    Hastie’s speech advanced a few points.  He spoke approvingly of Morrison’s response to Beijing.  He then embraced a tactic of minimisation: the alleged atrocities were localised, select.  Australia was “seeking to be honest and accountable for alleged wrongdoing by a small number of individuals entrusted to wear our flag.”  He also attacked the work of Crompvoets and the author herself.  The grounds of contention were various: the appearance of the author on 60 Minutes four days prior to the release of the Brereton Report; the leak of her report two weeks prior to the publication of the Inquiry’s findings; the decision to release the unredacted Crompvoets report alongside the redacted Brereton Report.

    “The Crompvoets report detailed unproven rumours of Australian soldiers murdering Afghan children.  It may have prompted the Brereton Report, but its evidentiary threshold was far lower.  The Brereton report neither rules these rumours in or out.  So why are they out in the open for our adversaries to use against us?”  Doing so had “undermined public confidence in the process and allowed the People’s Republic of China to malign our troops.”

    Hastie’s speech has a throbbing subtext: containment.  Despite professing a belief in the rule of law and transparency, the overwhelming sense from the politician who chairs the Parliamentary Joint Committee on Intelligence and Security is that the Inquiry should have been kept indoors.  Such bloodied laundry should never have been aired.  That, at the very least, would have avoided public discussions about the egregious methods of Australia’s elite warriors, and the decisions behind deploying them in the first place.

    This article was posted on Saturday, December 5th, 2020 at 1:23pm and is filed under Afghanistan, Australia, Children/Youth, Torture, War Crimes.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • The David McBride Case: Whistleblowing, Afghanistan and Australian War Crimes

    Much complaint can be had of the Inspector-General of the Australian Defence Force Afghanistan Inquiry Report. It exempts political actors of responsibility for alleged atrocities and war crimes. It suggests that those in the highest echelons of the Australian Defence Forces are ignorant in incompetent innocence.  It spares the desk warriors and flays the field operatives. Heavily redacted, this document suggests that no serious cleansing of the Augean stables is going to take place any time soon.

    One recommendation in the report does stand out for its logical decency. “Perhaps the single most effective indication that there is a commitment to cultural reform is the demonstration that those who have been instrumental in the exposure of misconduct, or are known to have acted with propriety and probity, are regarded as role models.”

    Unfortunately, we have no way of knowing who the people being recommended for promotion or pardon are, their names furiously blacked out in the public version of the report.  But hints can be gathered from the explicit reference to the role played by whistleblowers. “Too often, not only in the military, have the careers of whistleblowers been adversely affected.”

    One such whistleblower is Major David McBride, who once cut his teeth as a military lawyer and participated in two deployments to Afghanistan.  Between 2014 and 2016, McBride passed on information to the ABC on alleged war crimes committed in Afghanistan by Australian soldiers.  It began with the gathering of files from computers located in the joint-operations headquarters near Bungendore, east of the nation’s capital.  A report documenting alleged atrocities by special forces in Afghanistan came into being, though it bulked to cover the mishandling of sex abuse allegations within the military, and the treatment of women in the armed forces.  Avenues of internal disclosure were used, and exhausted.  McBride even sought to tempt the Australian Federal Police.  No one bit.

    In 2017, the material gathered by McBride became the trove of documents and revelations called The Afghan Files.  They were disturbing, enlightening, and did much to expose the whole sordid business of committing special forces to such theatres of war as Afghanistan.  But McBride’s view on the information was more panoramic and less specifically focused on the minutiae of brutality.  Australia’s special forces, he suggested in what can only be regarded as an eternal theme, were scapegoats for desk bound commanders and bureaucrats.  While soldiers killed and bled in the field, the pen pushers back in Canberra thrived.  “It’s a real sickness we need to work on,” he told the Sydney Morning Herald in June 2019.  “Everyone has an opinion poll.  No one wants to make a decision.”

    In that sense, McBride remains conventional, keen on proper process, and far from a garlanded peacenik.  He stares at officialdom, finds them wanting: they want to send soldiers to war, but in doing so, hobble them.  “If you are worried about Afghan deaths, why not pull us out? If you want us to fight the war, you have to be able to let us do it.”

    For his deeds, McBride faces five charges centred on theft of Commonwealth property, breaching the Defence Act and disclosing information without due authorisation.  In a preliminary hearing in 2019, he pleaded not guilty to all charges.

    His case has put a few Australian parliamentarians in a sour mood, though not those of the major parties, who remain characteristically cowed and cowardly on such subjects.  The well-meaning and often sound independent MP Andrew Wilkie is entirely clear about what should happen to McBride.  “The federal government must stop going after whistleblowers who risk everything to reveal what happens in dark corners.”  To that end, the government “must drop all charges against Mr McBride.”

    Senator Rex Patrick, another independent, has also urged the Commonwealth Director of Public Prosecutions to drop the charges.  McBride “is a hero” and in the absence of the CDPP failing to drop the case, “the Attorney-General should order the discontinuance of the prosecution under the powers afforded him by section 71(1) of the Judiciary Act.”

    Nick Xenophon, law partner of the firm representing McBride and himself a former federal parliamentarian, is also a standard bearer for whistleblowers.  In an open letter to the chief of the Australian Defence Forces, General Angus Campbell, he argued that it was only “whistleblowers like McBride and a handful of others who made the Brereton report possible by refusing to be intimidated into silence.  In my view, they have redeemed the reputation of our nation.  They do not deserve jail cells.”

    The answer supplied by General Campbell was nothing if not predictable.  When called upon to have a view on the subject of McBride’s liability, he retreated to the bunker of dispassionate propriety.  “I can’t speak to issues at play in a current court process,” he explained to the press last month.  “I am not in a position to do so.  I understand your concern and I appreciate that many here will speak to that issue, but I am not able to talk to it.”

    A petition started by Afghan Australian lawyer Arezo Safi, is bustling away to its intended target of 50,000.  (To date 38,552 have signed it.)  “As an Afghan-Australian and a lawyer, I am deeply upset by the persecution of David McBride, the brave whistleblower who exposed Australian Defence Force’s war crimes in Afghanistan.”  Democracy, she claims, is at stake without the exploits of McBride and his like.

    Support is also forthcoming from the Afghan Community Support Organisation of New South Wales.  In commending the efforts and findings of the investigation, its president Nadir Azami wanted the government to “go all the way and finish this goodwill and drop charges against Mr McBride”.  Doing so would show “good intention” in supporting future whistleblowers.

    Safi is dedicated in her advocacy for McBride, certain that he is “being celebrated for his bravery by the general public.”  But the approach to whistleblowers in Australia is at best fickle.  The system of protections are perniciously poor for those exposing national security information.  The best McBride can hope for at this point are sensible decisions made by the CDPP based on the public interest, a concept regularly used against, rather than for, the whistleblower.

    Should the matter ultimately wind its way to the Attorney-General Christian Porter, advocates for McBride will have every reason to be perturbed.  Porter is a dreary authoritarian who relishes the prosecutor’s garb.  He has already given a clue to fellow parliamentarians on what members of the public can expect.  Intervening in the McBride case “would be utterly extraordinary and would necessarily, by its very nature, represent political intervention in a process which has conventionally been independent.”

    This article was posted on Thursday, December 3rd, 2020 at 10:50am and is filed under Afghanistan, Australia, Major David McBride, War Crimes, Whistleblowing.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Not Adding Up: Australia, Iran and the Release of Kylie Moore-Gilbert

    Australia’s ambassadorial offices and political leaders have a consistent record of ignoring their citizens in tight situations.  David Hicks, Mamdouh Habib and Julian Assange are but a few names that come to mind in this inglorious record of indifference.  In such cases, Australian public figures and officials have tacitly approved the use of abduction, torture and neglect, usually outsourced and employed by allies such as the United States.

    Australian diplomacy, to that end, is nastily cheap.  It comes at heavily discounted prices, when it comes at all.  To then see the extent of interest and effort in seeking the release of Australian-British academic Kylie Moore-Gilbert from Iranian captivity, is as interesting as it is perplexing.  A work ethic in Canberra has come into being.  Nothing was spared securing the release of Moore-Gilbert, where she had been imprisoned for espionage charges and spent 804 days in detention.  Fears for her wellbeing spiked with her transfer to Qarchak women’s prison, not known for its salubrious facilities.  She had previously spent time at Tehran’s Evin prison.

    Efforts were made by Australian Foreign Minister Marise Payne, who raised Moore-Gilbert’s detention in four meetings with her Iranian counterpart, Mohammad Javad Zarif.  As she confirmed, the release “was achieved through diplomatic engagement with the Iranian government.”

    Iranian authorities put it to the Australians that they wanted three of their covert operatives – Saeid Moradi, Mohammad Kharzei and Masoud Sedaghat Zadeh – released.  The three men in question had been held in Thailand for planting explosive devices in Bangkok in an effort to assassinate Israeli diplomats in 2012.  Whatever the skills of these operatives, bomb making was evidently low on the list.  An accidental explosion holed their rented Bangkok villa.  Moradi was sentenced to life for his attempt to kill a police officer.  The police officer survived; Moradi’s legs did not, lost when a grenade he tossed bounced back and detonated.  Kharzei received 15 years for possessing explosives.

    With the list handy, the Australian government approached Thai contacts.  Moore-Gilbert’s release had, Payne claimed, become a matter of “absolute priority”.  Israeli government officials were also engaged. A secret agreement was reached, involving what was effectively a prisoner exchange.

    Whatever else is said of her case, the issue of the effort and labour put in is significant.  Throw in the cliché of being an academic with Middle-Eastern expertise working in foreign climes, and you have a recipe rather richer than is advertised.

    The heavily scripted nature of the affair is screamingly evident.  Media coverage of Moore-Gilbert’s release, and the circumstances of her detention, has avoided much in the way of analysis.  The tone is very much that of the official press release.  What we get, instead, are the anodyne statements from Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison, supposedly “thrilled and relieved” by the outcome.  “The tone of her voice was very uplifting, particularly given what she has been through.”  We also get notes of worry.  Amber Schultz of Crikey expressed concern about the prolonged “ordeal” that would continue to face Moore-Gilbert upon her return to Australia.

    That Moore-Gilbert’s release was, in fact, brokered as part of a broader prisoner release is not laboured over.  The prime minister is cryptic in his statement.  “If other people have been released in other places, they are the decisions of the sovereign governments.  There are no people who have been held in Australia who have been released.”  Skirted over, as well, is Moore-Gilbert’s relationship with an Israeli, which, according to the Sydney Morning Herald, led to “baseless claims that she was a spy for Israel.”

    Iran’s Young Journalist Club has its own serve on the subject, making mention of the release.  Moore-Gilbert “was swapped for an Iranian businessman and two other nationals incarcerated abroad on delusional accusations, Iranian news agencies reported.”  It notes a report by the IRNA news agency claiming that the academic “had passed a two-year special training course for her spying mission.”  She attained fluency in Persian “and was prepared to perform espionage activities in Iran.”  What interested the IRNA was her second visit, when “she entered Iran on the recommendation of the Zionist regime [Israel] on the lunar calendar month of Muharram”.  Details are sketchy on what Moore-Gilbert supposedly did.  She “travelled to different cities as part of her mission and gathered information.”

    For her part, Moore-Gilbert, in letters smuggled out of Evin prison, denies ever being a spy.  “I am not a spy.  I have never been a spy, and I have no interest to work for a spying organisation in any country.”

    The standard concern by some in the media stable is that such exchanges are common instruments in Tehran’s foreign policy arsenal.  The Australian director of Human Rights Watch, Elaine Pearson, suggested “a clear pattern by Iran’s government to arbitrarily detain foreign and dual nationals and use them as bargaining chips in negotiations with other states.”  The executive director of the Australian Israel and Jewish Affairs Council Colin Rubenstein saw the practice of using hostages in exchanges “for terrorists is typical of the tyrannical Iranian regime.”  Karim Sadjadpour, senior fellow with the Middle Eastern program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, notes “hostage-taking as a tool of statecraft for four decades now.  The Revolutionary Guards are blatant about it and believe it delivers results.”

    Such concerns are legitimate and consistent, though the circumstances for each situation varies.  Attention should be paid to the quarry being traded.  The Iranian Republic has a striking appetite for detaining academics and researchers.  French-Iranian academic Fariba Adelkhah, British-Iranian Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe and Iranian-Swedish academic Ahmadreza Djalali, have all been the subject of Tehran’s ire.  Djalali, also accused of spying for Israel, faces execution.

    The question not being asked is why Moore-Gilbert was that valuable so as to warrant the release of three Iranian agents.  Afshon Ostovar, an academic based at the Naval Postgraduate School’s Department of National Security Affairs, sees little in the incongruence; Iran negotiation strategy, he more than implies, lacks proportion.  “It seems rather puzzling that Iran’s imprisonment of an innocent foreign grad student [sic] should lead to the release of three of its covert agents jailed for failed explosive attacks in Thailand but that’s how the Islamic Republic does business.”

    One person not exactly cheering the prisoner swap is Israel’s former ambassador to Thailand, Itzhak Shoham.  On Israel’s Channel 12, he vented.  “I don’t know anything about this deal beyond what was published.  Of course it saddens me to see the pictures as [the Iranians] celebrate instead of rotting in prison, if they haven’t already been executed.”  Rather abstractedly, Shoham had one consolation: that the former chief of Iran’s Quds Force, General Qassem Soleimani, was killed in January in a US drone strike.

    This prisoner exchange is also odd in another respect.  Such instances are usually occasions of much fanfare for Tehran. Iranian television anchors tend to be at hand, noting the names of the released figures and their return to families.  “The reason for Iran’s refusal to name those freed remains unclear,” states the cautious Times of Israel.  “However, Tehran has long denied being behind the bomb plot and likely hopes to leverage the incoming administration of US President-Joe Biden to ease American sanctions imposed by President Donald Trump.”

    The nagging question remains: Why did the Australian government regard Moore-Gilbert’s case as exceptional?

    This article was posted on Saturday, November 28th, 2020 at 12:52pm and is filed under Australia, Espionage/”Intelligence”, Incarceration, Iran, Israel, Prisoner Exchange.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.